• 9 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I’m gonna echo what others have said here. The mastodon signup process is too complex, and searching for instructions just leads to “what is the fediverse and/or activitypub” explainers.

    I created a mastodon account a few years ago and it was my first introduction to the fediverse. It was frustrating and I only persevered because I REALLY wanted to replace twitter.

    Once I got it set up, I realized that no one who I followed on twitter was there. My feed is currently like 2 people, plus a bunch of dead accounts from people who dipped their toe in but didn’t stay.

    Joining Bluesky was simple, and there were already a bunch of accounts I wanted to follow. The recent influx has increased that, and it feels a lot like old school twitter without the nazis.

    People originally joined twitter (and stuck with it for so long) because that’s where everyone else is. Mastadon is too clunky join and use, so people aren’t.

















  • It was intentional, the goal was to permanently separate children from their families to deter immigrants and asylum seekers.

    This is a LONG article, but extremely detailed with tons of interviews and documents to back it up like emails and memos obtained via FOIA requests: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/trump-administration-family-separation-policy-immigration/670604/

    It’s also paywalled, but once archive.org comes back online you can find it there. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

    The main takeaway is that the family separation policy was pushed by Trump and his administration incessantly. It took a while to really start because various government officials were reluctant to do it, and kept trying to placate the White House by slow walking the whole thing.

    At one point, government lawyers who process asylum claims realized that the separated children were being shipped away from the local holding facility without any documentation, effectively “losing” them in the system. The lawyers figured this was just a terrible error and began processing asylum claims by the parents faster. If they could get it done within a week or so, the children would still be held in the nearby facility and could be reunited with their parents.

    The white house was furious and directed the holding facility to start “relocating” the children faster, so that they’d be lost in the system before the parents could be processed.

    The cruelty is the point.