Round 5

One important piece of information is that Magnus Carlsen has confirmed (once again) that he has no intention to play the Candidates, so the other three semifinalists, including underdog Nijat Abasov, should be directly qualified for the Candidates.

Link to the document (which is also linked in the article).

The article has a couple of inaccuracies and unjustified assumptions:

First of all, there is no Men’s category in chess, only Open and Women’s. The Open category is, as indicated by its name, open to everyone, men, women, cis, trans and anyone else, and it is not unusual that women compete in it (the most prominent case was Judit Polgar). This new FIDE document doesn’t change that, so a trans person is allowed in competitive play, contrary to what the title suggests. The Women’s category is restricted to only women, and this document explains how these restrictions are applied to trans people. Note that the existence of a Women’s category is controversial on its own.

Similarly, there are not Men titles and Women titles, only General titles (Grand Master, International Master,…) and Women titles (Women Grand Master, Women International Master,…), with the Women titles having lower requirements (again, very controversial). All the top women players are GMs, not WGMs. The FIDE document states that trans men will have their women titles abolished (unless they transition back), but they retain their general titles, and in case they don’t have one, their women title will be transferred to the general title of the equivalent level. The article incorrectly states that trans men “are set to be stripped of any titles if they were won pre-transition”.

Now, to the meat of the topic: the eligibility of trans women for the Women category:

Article 2.3 states that any person who has legally transitioned can certificate so to their National Rating Officer to change their gender in FIDE’s database. Once that that change in the database is done, trans women are restricted from Women events until a decision is made by FIDE Council “at the earliest possible time”. In these cases where the transition is backed up by legal documents, the decision by FIDE should be a formality and take little time.

Of course, this is only possible for countries who recognize gender changes. In case the National Rating Officer rejects the change, article 2.4 allows an appellation to the FIDE QC, and after that to the FIDE Council. In these cases the decision by the FIDE Council may take up more time, and FIDE sets a deadline of two years for that decision (but it doesn’t mean that every case will take two years).

And finally, just to be clear, all of this only applies to trans players who need to change their gender in FIDE’s database. Trans players that always have played under their post-transition gender, or that have changed their gender before this regulation, don’t need to go through this process. This is the case, for example, of Yosha Iglesias, the player mentioned in the article, and that is listed as female in FIDE’s database, and consequently she can play in any Women’s event she wants.

All in all, I think there is much unnecessary red tape, especially for the trans people more at risk, those who live in countries where they are persecuted. And that the excessive red tape is most likely based on transphobia. But the situation is not as extreme as many other sports that have directly banned the participation of trans players.

Begun, the AdBlocker Wars have.

From the infamous AMA: We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.

To me it sounds that he is envious that 3rd party apps were profitable and Reddit isn’t.

The word you’re looking for is sustainable, not profitable

Some people, like Elon Musk, want us to believe that social networks are a “digital town square”, but imo that’s a pretty poor metaphor. Social networks are more similar to “digital pubs”. They are places where you go to meet, chat and share with your people. Of course it is a public place, and anyone can listen to your conversations, and in principle, even join. But social networks, as pubs, and as any other human interaction, are governed by (mostly unwritten) social contracts, codes of conduct and etiquette. You are not supposed to join a conversation uninvited, and if you are invited, you are supposed to treat the others with respect.

However, these groups systematically and purposely violate the social contracts, they hijack spaces and conversation where they were not invited and insult, harass and harm anyone who doesn’t think like them or simply if they find it funny. They are the drunkards that instigate bar fights. And as in real life, the owners don’t want disruptive elements in their pubs.

At this point, the Internet is 40 years old, and mass-adoption happened more than 20 years ago. Most of us have been part of many communities before lemmy and/or kbin. And the disruptive elements are always the same. There are many groups of people with different opinions on religion, social issues, economical policies, etc, and yet only the far-right insists on the on-line persecution of their opponents. And their strategy works as long as the apologist support them.

This isn’t a matter of echo chambers. You can hear many different voices on lemmy/kbin. The only requirement to have you voice heard is basic respect, and that is something that the far-right refuses to do.

Antichess, the truly anarchic variant, where en passant is really forced

You still haven’t addressed my point. Do you think it is desiderable that homosexual people are beaten to a pulp? Is a YES/NO question, it shouldn’t be difficult to answer.

Whatever, I copied your whole paragraph in another comment, and the context is pretty clear for anyone who cares to read it. I didn’t claim that you personally were threatening to do the beating, only that you thought that the beating was desiderable for the “program of western civilization”. If you really don’t want homosexual people to be beaten to a pulp, then you should seriously reconsider how you express your ideas.

You are longing for the times when “Homosexuals were regularly taken outside and beaten to a pulp”. Isn’t this hateful?

I don’t usually go to through other people’s comment history, but this one is a goldmine

“It made sense back when everyone was, more or less, on board with the program of western civilization. We may not all have been Christian back then, but almost all of us were, and everyone supported Judeo-Christian values without question. Homosexuals were regularly taken outside and beaten to a pulp, so it was extremely rare for anyone to think such behavior was acceptable. At this point we need to ask ourselves what the purpose of freedom is. Are we a free people so we can exercise perverted pleasures of the flesh, the slaughter of innocent babies, and genital mutilation of children without their parents knowledge? If you answer “yes”, you just might be repeating the whisper of a demon.”

“woke neo-marxism claims that any normal person is bad. That means its practitioners openly discriminate against conservative white Christian men, especially if they practice heterosexual behavior in a traditional marriage.”

“Ironically, secession is about the most American thing we could do at this point”

And, the timing of their supposed interest in the Fediverse is after the second notable exodus from a major social network. Meta sees more people

Project 92 has been on the news since at least May 20, a couple of weeks before the Reddit drama, and it seems that they have been testing it with influencers for months.

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment about Facebook, but I think some of these takes fail to get the whole picture. Facebook isn’t interested in us, Fediverse users and our communities. As you said, they only care about money. And the money today is in creating a competitor to Twitter. Mastodon happens to have an open-source Twitter clone, and Facebook can use it without spending much in coding. Also, the federation aspect allows advertisers to defederate from problematic communities, which is why they’re leaving Twitter.

Meta sees more people & more engagement here which equates to more potential profits on their end.

According to the article that I linked, every Instagram account will carry to a Project 92 account. There are like 2 million Lemmy accounts, and a few millions more of Mastodon accounts. Instagram has billions, with b, of accounts. We are anecdotal in comparison with the engagement that the migrated Instagram users will create.

We are not Meta’s target. We are the ones that will suffer their consequences.

What a sad day. Reddit is doing PiPi in their pampers.

Then, we’ll wait for that random-ass user to actually subscribe to any new sub/community over there, which they’ll only do if it’s any good

[citation needed]

That doesn’t make any sense. Why would Facebook be interested in buying existing instances? The code is open source, they can use it without asking permission. Their server infrastructure is way better that anything we have. And our user base is ridiculously small compared to theirs (Instagram has more than one billion users!). The danger of Facebook taking over the Fediverse is not that they buy instances, it’s that they Embrace-Extend-Extinguish us.

That being said, I do think that we “are using the Fediverse wrong”, and that we should gravitate to smaller instances of like-minded people. This would make much easier instance-level moderation and server load, and de-federation would make more sense. Now there are a bunch of generalist big instance (kbin.social, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works) that are federating/defederating for reasons that aren’t completely transparent to their users. But if you have, say, a small doglove.rs instance and a small catlove.rs instance, they can defederate themselves without impacting users that are not involved in the beef amongst the instances.

The person above wasn’t talking about that. They were talking about fragmentation. For example, I am subscribed to three different Formula 1 communities/magazines, one in kbin.social, another in lemmy.ml and another in lemmy.world. There is no difference between them, other than the site they’re hosted. I know that I can participate in all of them, and I have participated in all three. But I’m still unsure how should I participate. If I find an interesting article, should I post it only to one of them? To which one? Or crosspost it to all? (btw, lemmy has an option to crosspost, but kbin doesn’t) And if the topic is posted in several communities, should I comment in one or in all of them? Maybe should I encourage people to migrate to the larger community? Or maybe we could solve the problem by creating a unified community!

Only the landed gentry is allowed to use the medieval spelling

“Explain how Google would impact XMPP servers if they defederate from Google Talk”

Spoiler: They can

[Google got] into open source software and it seems those survived the experience

Not really. Google is responsible for the open source browser Chromium, which is the base for Google Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. They dominate the browser market, and they use their position to implement features outside the web standard. Their competitors (mainly Firefox) are not able to implement the non-standard features, driving them out of the market. Classic Embrace-Extend-Extinguish.

Google got into the Linux space

Technically, both Android and Chromebok are Linux-based. But Google has done everything possible so that they aren’t part of the “Linux space”, to the point that Android uses a fork of version 3.x of the Linux kernel (regular Linux is now at version 6.x).