Threatening political retribution against senators for voting against their party is generally not illegal in the USA.

I think the micro stream AAA might have just one mode but would have to check.

It does. It’s a bad flashlight though. Everything (LED, optics, switch, threads) is different (worse) from the USB model, which I still wouldn’t class as a good flashlight.

he deserves the team around him that he wants. It’s not up to us to determine that.

It absolutely is up to the senate to determine that. The constitution says so.

Lights with modern performance and only a single mode don’t really exist. Even lights that appear to be that almost always start out on a higher mode and throttle to a lower one. The main reason for that is that to avoid burning the user’s hand and/or having a very short battery life, the output has to be relatively low.

If your flashlight has much less output than most of its competitors, you will not sell very many flashlights (unless you’re Zebralight - normal rules don’t apply to Zebralight).

Depending on why you don’t want brightness settings, there may be some good options for you. If it’s that the lights you’ve used change brightness when you turn them on and off, almost none of the lights flashlight enthusiasts like behave that way.

Probably not. US international relations is heavily driven by an amoral power calculus.

Israel is a major foil to Iran. Iran is an ally of Russia and China and a threat to US interests in the region. Barring an extreme amount of pressure from constituents, which has not reached that threshold as far as I can tell, most US politicians will tolerate almost any human rights abuse from Israel.

I have seen that lemmy.world apparently has a very poor reputation among other instances.

It’s the largest by far, with five times the monthly active population of #2. One of the main things people want out of federated systems is decentralization, and having one huge dominant server goes against that goal.

I should note .world wasn’t the biggest when I signed up. I picked it because mastodon.world was a known quantity, which led me to believe the same team would run a stable server.

Most servers don’t micromanage community moderation. That sort of thing could happen almost anywhere.

When I say “by default”, I meant the vanilla Mastodon web client. Of course alternate clients could do just about anything.

It’s quite resistant to any single entity’s censorship, but if you share things most server admins consider unacceptable, other servers will block your server.

lemmy.ml… copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism”

At least one of the Lemmy developers is a hardcore communist, and some people see lemmy.ml as a little sketchy for that reason. I see you found another server, which is exactly how federation is meant to work. While the overall culture tends to be left-leaning, most server admins are not hardcore communists and don’t censor political positions that aren’t advocating violence or discrimination.

I’ve self-hosted Pleroma, Hubzilla, Mastodon, and Wordpress with the ActivityPub plugin. I found Pleroma to be the easiest of those.

I think I’d recommend Akkoma today; it’s a fork of Pleroma.

There’s nothing in the text of the Constitution that says they don’t.

Like most sane people, I think that decision was overly broad and has dangerous implications. On the other hand, if Congress could make crimes about Article 2 powers, that would effectively allow Congress to take those powers for itself by statute, overruling the Constitution’s assignment of them to the president.

I could imagine them trying to include corporations… but seriously, Constitutional textualism is a cornerstone of what it means to be a conservative judge. They’re pretty content to ignore or reverse precedent, but not to get creative about something spelled out plainly in the Constitution.

the conservative SCOTUS will not overturn an unconstitutional law.

I think you might be surprised here. Conservative judges are inclined to follow the plain meaning of the text of the Constitution at the time it was written. There’s not much wiggle room in this:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

I don’t think long posts in Mastodon are a bad thing at all. I self-host and I changed the character limit to 50000.

By default, Mastodon will collapse long posts in feeds. If you don’t want to see long posts, you don’t have to click to expand them.

If you have millions of people on a social network, and you go looking for toxic shit there, you will find it.

Well, on Mastodon, you might not because by default it doesn’t have a useful text search feature. If you’re on a server running a modified version, or something else with decent text search, you might. My self-hosted server was on a relay that briefly pulled in content from a famously toxic server. At first, I didn’t see it because I didn’t follow those accounts, but later, I added an improved search feature and tried searching for some terms of abuse. I did find a few absolutely vile posts.

Bluesky has had a working search from early on. Turning off some of the default moderation filters and searching for terms of abuse does, in fact find people using terms of abuse.

I’m puzzles as to why anyone would routinely post threads to Mastodon rather than moving to an instance without a short limit.

I’m not going to make a very good case for a position I consider terribly misguided, but in short it’s because trolls on other platforms search for terms related to people they want to harass.

Some people have also raised objections centered around privacy or consent to process data. I find that misguided too; ActivityPub is radically public in that it sends every action to a bunch of other peoples’ computers, and there’s no explicit consent to do any of the other stuff a server might do with posts.

Of course any server owner can just select * from statuses where text like '%search string%'.

Search and discovery are a big deal. It’s much less effort to find people and content, and to be found on Bluesky than on Mastodon/ActivityPub. It takes work on Mastodon, and I don’t think Pleroma, Misskey, and their forks are doing much better (though I believe Akkoma has a decent search function).

This is, in part because there is a very vocal contingent of ActivityPub users who do not want working search and discovery. I think that’s equivalent to saying they don’t want the network to gain mainstream popularity.

It does look like it’s possible to independently host all the components of the ATProto network now, so I’m hoping we’ll see a bunch of services pop up soon such that the network becomes more resistant to enshittification. I’ve seen Whitewind and Frontpage, but I don’t fully understand the federation model and haven’t been able to cause one to display posts from another.

It’s kind of not. It does appear to be at least theoretically possible to self-host any or all of the major components. Unlike ActivityPub projects, however, it doesn’t seem like anybody is doing that and offering services to the public.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. What I do think is true is that there’s a chance some AI thing will be a trillion dollar investment, and the most motivating thing for VCs is fear of missing out on a giant score.

A nonprofit open source profit ought to have different motivations though.