You are clearly not a victim of these issues and the situation is so alien to you that apparently the only way for you to relate to them is via the news. Violence and prejudice are things that happen to “other people”.

Real people are suffering real oppression every day. Some in a small almost invisible way and others live in permanent fear of violence because of who they are.

That things were worse in the past is no reason to stop progress. And things did get better because people fought for them, often to death.

I hope you are arguing in good faith and have the moral strength to accept you may be blind to some realities and reconsider your beliefs.

Conservatism by definition is thinking “Things are good right now, let’s not change anything” or even worse: “Things were better before, let’s go back to that”.

The issue is “better for who”? Women, queer people, POC, working class people were NOT ok. Implicitly you can see that conservatism is bigoted by (at a minimum) ignoring or misrepresenting the realities of people they don’t care about. It’s just that lately, more and more conservatives are explicit about it and showing their true colors, but the philosophical underpinnings are the same.

I’m as leftist as they come but I think it’s their prerogative to defederate from any instance they want. If you and/or your content are not welcome there you should respect that. It would be kind of authoritarian otherwise, wouldn’t it?

Censorship is not what’s happening, because you’re always free to express yourself in countless other spaces if you want. That does not mean that they’re are forced to read what you say.

Crack’s certainly involved in all this.

It will be full of nsfw pictures of people wearing lab coats in no time. So, an absolute win.

It doesn’t appear like they value growth for growth’s sake. And that’s cool because it lets them focus on other, arguably more important, stuff. Many of our preconceived notions about social networking don’t translate well to the federation model.

And now, on repeat, for days: Baby shark.

Be careful with this line of thought. It’s called Horseshoe theory and is usually parroted by right wing authoritarians to falsely discredit leftist points of view. Ironic that they are using some of their own beliefs to do it, isn’t it?

More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

That being said, there surely are authoritarian leftists and they do not deserve any of your time. However, their authoritarianism usually is not born out of hatred like right wingers but out of impotence against the hierarchies that dominate our lives. Of course, as in everything, YMMV.

Edit to add: it’s important to mention that a lot of pro China and pro Russia discourse is astroturfing so it’s not really people declaring earnest beliefs.

This and having a fuckton of scummy users being sent our way by accounts like Libs of TikTok. Harassment will be unbearable and large-scale, especially for tiny instances.