some guy sharing his thoughts

kbin userstyles
kbin userscripts

pretty cool places that I moderate:

  • 49 Posts
  • 122 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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 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).













  • 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.