Juniper (she/her) 🫐

I know about Hexbear and wanted to mention that it was a Hexbear user but this ironically happened just a moment after I made my own Hexbear account. I know some of the users there are extreme, particularly that user, but the community overall I find worth it.

That said I have to wonder what you mean when you say to avoid getting in trouble and to stay safe. Is there a history of people being harassed or harmed by those groups?

Yep, and it wouldn’t be very far back in my history if you want to see it. My last comment in that convo started with “ugh”. I was talking about transgender issues with someone who was extremely argumentative and kept strawmanning my beliefs so I told them in no uncertain terms that I was done with the conversation and blocked them. Later I decided to unblock them and discovered that they had replied not only to that final comment continuing to tell me I’m a bad person for their strawman interpretation of what I said, but to another comment I made in a different thread.

So this person who is actively insulting me also has the ability to follow me around and continue insulting me, and blocking them just makes me unable to defend myself.

Actual functional user blocking. I don’t want users being able to see my comments and reply to them when I have blocked them and I was totally surprised when they did.

Can you give a summary of why that is?

Baseball cap! Wearing it now actually. It has a mesh back and a gray front with my state’s shape on it patterned with a rainbow 🌈

https://12ft.io/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/why-the-internet-isnt-fun-anymore

When they put up a 10 foot wall, use a 12 foot ladder

Broadcast degrade, which wouldn’t mean much for already existing conqueror civilizations looking for anyone to invade, but does mean the signal isn’t entirely endless and we don’t broadcast with the strength to reach very far (what with our only needing to send them around our planet). Our historic signals may very well never make it to civilizations advanced enough to hear them just due to distance and the fact that space isn’t a perfect vacuum; signals degrade linearly as they are overwhelmed by the comparatively much more powerful background radiation. Digitally encoded signals like the ones we send now would be even harder to detect as the information would seem random.

Additionally, if we were to stop broadcasting then our broadcast would be effectively an expanding bubble with a ~130 light-year thick surface, so while it may reach a civilization and continue to reach them for 130 years, there is a chance it would reach them prior to technological advancement and it would pass by without detection. Of course in this case we assume that a new civilization would be hostile.

The party example doesn’t really work here because there is no start time to be on time or fashionably late/early to.

Fun conversation, this is the stuff I used to love reddit for 😊

Idk, this seems anthropocentric. Why would we be the first? I understand that there is some degree of truth to the universe being young, but that seems as likely as us being the only advanced life, which assumes that we are some special exception.

It seems more likely that other technologically advanced life may have gone intentionally dark (minimizing signals that may leave the solar system) for safety. It’s possible humans will do this some day, maybe after we detect alien life and determine it is dangerous. Or, they prioritized harmony and stewardship of their planet and stopped broadcasting (or never did) because that is incompatible with their life style.

Here’s a good example. An account I have blocked replied to me. If they go into a sub I moderate and start acting like a jackass, I’ll never know because I have them blocked.

The only way I’d see it, is if someone reported it.

This is why, when I was a reddit moderator (r/Firefox), I never blocked users even if they were absolute trash to me. I always thought of that as a severe limitation of the platform, there should be a setting to show blocked user’s content (labelled as such) in communities you moderate.