From what I can gather, this particular design was proposed by Puerto Rico’s New Progressive Party (Partido Nuevo Progresista or PNP), which advocates for Puerto Rican statehood. The circle definitely has its appeal, though I think I’d prefer something closer to the current flag.

But Eigel isn’t alone in his condemnation of the bill. Another Republican, Missouri State Senator Sandy Crawford, claimed the incest and rape provision shouldn’t pass because “God is perfect.”

“God does not make mistakes. And for some reason he allows that to happen, bad things happen,” Crawford said. “I’m not gonna be able to support the amendments because I am very pro-life.”

You can’t help but appreciate the sheer amount of cognitive dissonance you gotta have to say, “God is perfect,” and “…for some reason He allows … bad things [to] happen.” How delusional can you be to say that raped children giving birth is part of some perfect, divine plan?

Social conservatism is a complete joke.

…Who exactly is asking for this? AI chatbots are cool and all, but I have no idea why you’d want them in your messages app. What would you even need that for?

Oop, forgot to post the symbolism. Just posted that in a separate comment.

When I was going through redesigning all of the U.S. state flags, this is one of the first designs I made. Here’s the symbolism:

• The colors are reminiscent of the orange, white, & blue pattern used in many of New York’s state flag.

  • The blue has been replaced with the purple of the Iroquois flag.

• The white shape in the center holds several meanings.

  • It resembles a crown to represent New York being the Empire State.
  • It points upward to represent New York’s motto: “Excelsior” (“Higher”).
  • It looks somewhat like tall skyscrapers because duh.

This is my take on a flag for Kbin, a fediverse thread aggregator like Lemmy (and the one that I use). There isn’t that much to the symbolism behind it. There’s magneta because there’s magenta in the logo, and there’s a slash to go with the shape of the logo.

I also used this flag for the icon of this community’s Kbin equivalent: @vexillology.

What’s that even supposed to be? Even ignoring it’s… distinct shape, it seems like it was just a bad idea from the beginning.

The current flag

Since I already like Rhode Island’s flag a lot, I didn’t want to go too far from the original design. I decided to make the following three changes:

• The background was changed from white to blue. I felt yellow on blue popped a lot more due to the higher contrast, and it helps a lot with the nautical vibe.
• The “HOPE” ribbon was removed. It’s fine, but I prefer the flag without it.
• The ratio was changed from 29:33 (🤮) to 1:1 to match maritime signal flags.

Oof, that’s never fun. When I’m typing a long comment, I always spam copy it so that I can paste it back if I end up losing it. On PC, you can even use Windows+V to pull up a clipboard history, which has come in handy more than once.

Anywho, glad my reply was helpful! There are a lot of ways to interact with the content on the fediverse, and it seems like you’re well on your way to finding one that works best for you. Hope you enjoy it here!

This flag was used by the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. As you can see, it has a very intricate design rich with symbolism.

Fun fact: The escutcheon (shield) of the Jamahiriya’s coat of arms uses a similar level of excruciating detail.

This is a really nice flag! You’re right to feel confident about the geometry—it’s great. The colors, however, could use some work.

• In general, the shades you’ve chosen just aren’t really vibrant. Look at other flags, and you’ll see that they use pretty saturated blues, reds, yellows, greens, etc.
• You want to avoid colors that look really similar being right next to each other. You do this for the most part—for example, you separate the red and green with a white outline, which is great—but the green and blue are a problem. Green and blue are already pretty similar colors, but the shades you’ve shown make them almost identical. I’d make them much more different (for example, make the blue very dark and the green less teal) or, like another comment suggested, remove one of the colors entirely.

I think there are a few culprits here.

• Not everything wants to be an everything app. While everything in the fediverse uses ActivityPub, that doesn’t mean everything has to aim to be interoperable. I wrote a lengthy rant about this here, but essentially, it’s important to have things with a more specific, restricted purpose if we want the fediverse to be accessible. If someone just wants a thread aggreegator (i.e., just Reddit’s style of media), they shouldn’t be forced to grapple with microblogging features more fit for a Twitter-like. There are some platforms that aim to combine different media types—Kbin/Mbin has both thread aggregation and microblogging, and I’ve heard that Friendica tries to work well with everything. Even so, if someone wants federated Reddit, they should be able to have federated Reddit, and Lemmy aims to provide that. The same way that Pixelfed (an image-sharing platform like Instagram) doesn’t need to incorporate Reddit-style threads or Twitter-style microblogs, Lemmy doesn’t have to do it all.

• Federation is still in the works. Something to keep in mind is that most of these platforms are early in development and still working out a lot of bugs. Kbin (the platform I use) is an obvious example due to its currently incredibly spotty microblog federation (tho I’ve heard that Mbin has implemented fixes to fare better in this regard). We have to be patient while all the kinks are worked out. As much as we all wish it didn’t, software development takes time—a lot of it.

• Admins can sometimes be a bit trigger-happy with defederation. I don’t think the fediverse has quite grasped that defederation is essentially the nuclear bomb of instance moderation tools, cutting off interaction with all users of an instance. While there are times where this is justified (even preemptively, such with Threads imo), there are times where the nuke has been threatened over a quarrel between admins or disagreements about other defederations. Hopefully, this will cool down as the fediverse matures, but we’ll have to see how that pans out (especially with Threads federation growing ever nearer).

Continuing with the trend of vexillological organizations having their own flags, the Flag Society of Australia has one. While the flag within the flag looks really cool and has a nice color palette, I think the flag as a whole looks a bit odd. The Southern Cross looks weird since its stars are crowded closer together but not shrunken themselves, and the arrangement of everything just doesn’t work imo.

this is brown according to that Wikipedia page

They’ve been mostly resolved in my experience. Kbin.social has been working great.

@interstellar is being developed for Android, and Lunar is working on Kbin support for iOS. Still a good ways to go tmk, but we’re getting there!

If I’m not free to join the Fediverse from the server of my choice, whether that’s mastodon.social or threads.net, is the Fediverse truly free?

Joining the fediverse is just a matter of using a platform that implements ActivityPub (the protocol that lets servers communicate with each other. If Threads implements ActivityPub, it’s part of the fediverse, and the people on Threads can interact without any instance that chooses to federate.

However, instances don’t have to federate with Threads. That’s part of the freedom of the fediverse. If an instance admin decides that they don’t want to deal with an influx of hate, don’t want most of the content their uses see to be from Meta, or just don’t want to federate with a for-profit company that has an awful track record, they should be able to defederate. If a user of that instance really wants to see Threads content, they should be able to move to an instance that lets them, but defederation doesn’t make the fediverse or ActivityPub less free.

When I made this flag, I used red to symbolize the violent history of the Kansas Territory, a yellow stripe at the bottom to evoke a wheat field (given that one of Kansas’s nicknames is the Wheat State), and a sunflower at the top left. I didn’t notice the communist connotation of a red flag with a yellow symbol in the canton until someone pointed it out back when I posted this on Reddit. I still really like how the design looks, though maybe it’d be best to change the red to blue.

100% agree. I don’t have pine trees on all my New England flag redesigns (just New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine), but I might make versions where all of them do, maybe with the same pine tree design.

Thanks for the feedback!

I’ve honestly never thought of the Mexico comparison, though I can kinda see it now. I think the buff center and the pine tree are enough to differentiate it from the Mexican flag, though I may flip the green and red.

The tree design was taken directly from Maine’s ensign, and the star position came from Maine’s old flag. As for the Texas point, the lone star is used in other U.S. state flags, like those of Arizona and California (and North Carolina but that one does just look like a Texas flag ripoff), so I don’t think it’s unfitting to use it here, especially since it was on the old flag.