The point of my hypothetical is that communicable diseases have a tendency to evolve to be less pathogenic over time.

That’s not actually a real thing. It was a theory by a guy in the 1800s that’s been soundly debunked but spread because people want to believe it’s true.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/08/facebook-posts/viruses-and-other-pathogens-can-evolve-become-more/

And notably they’re not really two entirely unrelated things. “SARS” is SARS-CoV-1 and “COVID” is SARS-CoV-2.

Office buildings are test tubes, schools are petri dishes.

Polling generally showed Democrats supporting masking by a massive margin. The most recent poll I could find (April 2022) had support for mandatory masking on public transportation among Democrats as 80-5.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/majority-of-americans-support-mask-mandates-for-travel-ap-poll-finds

What’s the point of this hypothetical? It’s both not remotely close to where we are currently and has redefined the consequences to absurdity.

“Would you still wear a mask if the consequence of infection was a single light sneeze?”

“Would you wear a seat belt if the only consequence of car crashes was a small bruise?”

And those were the good old days when they were just trying to be subtly racist, rather than the now times where they’re just straight up trying to smuggle Nazi dog whistles in.

And pair that with the government saying it’s mostly killing old people and those with health issues then just declaring it over. I wasn’t expecting lockdown forever, but just like keeping it as an ongoing health concern. Instead they’ve been wiping their site of tracking, dropping funding, and abandoning workers to just hope their employer isn’t going to get them sick. COVID being over is good politically and good for business, so COVID is over.

Federation only duplicates stuff an instance’s users subscribe to, so if you’re a single user instance it wouldn’t copy anything you don’t see (if you actually vet your subscriptions and regularly view their content).

Sure, but you’re whatabouting an injustice of some people being temporarily detained to FOUR MILLION LIVES. If that was actually all it took, that’s a pretty reasonable exchange.

The consequences were way better than the let 'er rip nations. If China had a death toll equivalent to the United States, they’d have 5 million dead. Even the “China is lying” people are talking about hundreds of thousands, or possibly a million, not 5 million.

Staying COVID-zero until better treatments and vaccines are available actually does save lives.

It’s not like the rich countries are self-evidently sober and stable in their politics and climate impacts. The richest one just had their own wannabe fascist and has both been responsible for a large part of emissions and rarely met their climate goals.

The problem is that the regulations drop off in this one particular niche that requires/encourages larger vehicles, not that the regulations exist in the first place.

Yeah, I think the statement was kind of awkward and muddled what at its core was an anti-trolling stance with ideological examples. They’re trolling for those reasons and you can expect them keep doing it because they (theoretically) care deeply about waging that “war”, but the problem is the trolling, not their motivations.

I started out in lukewarm support, but the comments on the defederation posts pushed me into wholehearted support. I’d mostly forgotten how exhausting their brand of trolling and disingenuous argumentation was, and now can’t imagine voluntarily returning to a social space awash in that. I certainly wouldn’t open a sub somewhere they could (conveniently) access, so while it may cut off potential users for your streetwear sub, I expect there are a lot of other mods breathing a sigh of relief to not have their volunteer labor made noticeably more time consuming because we have to give trolls a chance to be trolly enough to warrant the drama of a breakup. Much easier to just never integrate in the first place.

They didn’t spring up from nothing, it’s a r/CTH (sub responsible for a lot of trolling and brigading) successor instance. We don’t have to pretend to not know who they were on Reddit, especially when statements from their admin still support “war on liberalism in the Fediverse” and won’t punish users banned from other instances “for being an asshat”. It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and literally came from a duck. We can put two and two together.

The account you’re explaining is a sterling example of why defederating from Hexbear is a good idea. I’d forgotten what Chapo trolling was like, but it’s very much this. Just sort of immature vaguely-confusing “ironic” trolling over and over again. They’re fishing for a ban and will no doubt go celebrate it somewhere else when they get it, but until they get it they’ll just make comment sections dumber.

I don’t even remember what Reddit’s statement was, so trust in them doesn’t enter into it. I simply don’t see any reason to trust convenient narratives from CTH mods. It’s far too cute a narrative from a source that absolutely would make something up for the lulz alone, let alone a story that also casts them as righteous heroes against cartoonishly stupid evil.

The userbase of CTH and other socialist subreddits only have that same narrative to repeat. Saying “they all heard it too” means nothing.

It’s never going to be literally 100% of users on an instance. It’s more of a balancing act of “is the communication with this instance a net positive for our users”. It takes a good amount of unmoderated toxicity to balance out the benefit of just regular old communication, but it doesn’t need to be literally everyone all the time.

The user didn’t ask about being banned for breaking rules, they asked about being banned for “being an asshat”.

That’s also very fair. Federation only works if the interchange of users doesn’t degrade the communities in each instance. If it’s just a bunch of safe home bases that can go out and be assholes as long as it’s somewhere else the whole thing falls apart.

If the reason for the ban is explicitly (as presented by the user) “being an asshat”, then yes, the source instance should consider banning them as well. Defederation is exactly the expectation (from Carcosa in their post) if too many users from an instance go elsewhere to be asshats.