Ok, I’ll engage you on this one, your position at least seems internally consistent.

Let’s play out this example - your 2 year old niece is sick, and so are you. You recently found out that she even exists - you didn’t know you had a sister until CPS told you she’s your responsibility.

An action that risks your life could possibly save her… Let’s say a liver transplant. It has to be you, you’re her only living family member. And because of that, you’ll also be responsible for her - you can put her up for adoption when this is all over, but you’re still on the hook for the medical bills whether this works or not.

She’s guaranteed to die if you don’t give her the transplant, and you would almost certainly recover quickly on your own.

If you go through with the transplant, she has a slim chance to live, and an even slimmer one to have a decent quality of life.

But in your current state, the transplant is very risky - at best you’ll see a lengthy and expensive recovery, after missing months of work you’ll be tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Complications could see you paralyzed or in lifelong pain, and it’s very possible both of you die on the table - maybe even likely.

The doctors are telling you it’s a terrible idea to go through with this, that the risk is unacceptable and it would be a mercy to just let her pass, but they’re obligated to go through with it if you insist.

Now, no one is stopping you from going through with it - if you want to put your life on the line for another, that’s your decision to make. You’re her guardian now, so it’s your decision if she should have to go through the pain for the chance at life, no matter how small.

That’s all well and good - I’ve seen enough to know that death is often a mercy, but if you believe otherwise there’s not much to say

Now, here’s my question - should the government be able to force you to attempt the transplant?

Some of these details might seem weird, but I was trying to stick the metaphor as close as possible to a very real scenario with a dangerous pregnancy. The only difference is - the doctor is performing an action here, but withholding one with the pregnancy.

You’re not though - pregnancy is not a lack of action. It’s an enormous commitment, especially when it’s atypical. It can even be a practically guaranteed death sentence - if the fetus implants in the fallopian tubes, it’s already not viable - at best you’re waiting for the fetus to grow big enough to rupture them, and hoping the bleed that causes doesn’t do too much damage before you can get help.

Not to mention if a fetus dies in the womb after it gets to a certain size, it rots and leads to sepsis - unclear laws and harsh punishments have already led to situations where doctors refused care for both of these life threatening cases, and in both these cases the odds aren’t slim, they’re none. In the second the fetus was already gone… Sometimes when they induce labor the fetus isn’t even in one piece… It’s pretty grisly

I don’t agree with your belief that a potential life is the same as a life, but let’s set that aside - I can respect that as a belief

So… My root question to you is - Should you be able to force someone to risk their own for someone else?

If so, how sure do you have to be that the other person will die no matter what you do before you’re released from the compulsion to put your own health on the line?

There’s always at least some risk of pregnancy turning fatal for the mother. How much danger do you have to be in for the math to check out?

And also, to what point should politicians with little understanding of medicine be able to deny you care?

That ship has sailed… So many sites don’t actually change pages, they just load different data - it’s way faster and looks better

Problem is, the back button takes you off the site no matter where you are, so now you can change the URL and change the history through code to have the best of both worlds

Then, there’s the people who do it badly, and there’s the people who think “hey, if you need pro StarCraft level clicking speed to back out of my site, maybe for some reason that will make them decide to stay”

By convincing people at large that social media run by individuals or groups isn’t viable.

Personally, I’d do it by attacking the credibility of the admins. Sow doubt. “they only run servers so they can steal your data”, “look at this guy! He pretends he cares about free speech, but he’s abusing his power to censor and radicalize people!” “The only reason you’d use these private instances is if you have something to hide. That place is for criminals”

They might even be able to get legislation passed to make it legally risky to run the servers in the US if they control the narrative

Only early adopters, technical people, and the privacy minded care about how this actually works, and we’ve been telling our friends and family how bad Facebook is for years (for good reason). At first they didn’t care, but now I get push back

Next, make it unreliable. If it goes down frequently, gets flooded by bots, or just starts to suck in general, most of the people here now will leave, no matter how important federated social networks are. Maybe they’ll go to servers that bend over backwards to become offshoots of threads, maybe they’ll look for Reddit clones elsewhere, personally I’d start up a private federation for friends and family if this goes south

Regardless, this place will become an empty mall - if it’s not a healthy form of social media I’m not going to spend much time here, and I’m extremely passionate about it

And the last option is just ads and incentives. Make it tempting and play to fomo.

They’ll probably do all of this to some degree, especially if we explode in numbers and present actual competition.

We’re ready to handle it, but we also need to make sure the battle lines are as far away as possible

As a late millennial and a programmer, I’ve got you.

So when you request a web page, before anything else, the server gives you a 3 digit status code.

100s means you asked for metadata

200s mean it went ok

300s means you need to go somewhere else (like for login, or because we moved things around)

400s mean you messed up

500s mean I messed up

So this is in the 400s. Each specific code means something - you’ve probably seen 404, which means you asked for a page that isn’t there. And maybe 405, which means you’re not allowed to see this

418 means you asked for coffee, but I’m a teapot

I share your priorities, but I don’t think you understand the depth and breath of how they can ruin this for us… The only guarantee is that, at some point (maybe tomorrow, maybe in 5 years), they’ll ask “how can we extract value from this investment?”. That’s what a corporation is, it can’t help it anymore than fire can choose how hot to burn

But even before then, we have misaligned goals. At best, their priority is to generate an endless stream of advertiser friendly content, extract information about users, and grow endlessly. At worst, they want to use us to help kill Twitter while ensuring federation of individuals does not become a viable model for social media