pixelfed is appealing because its basically early instagram, but instagram is so poisoned now that i kind of cant even imagine the innocence of just posting random pictures and having my friends like them anymore
its funny when i think about like, internet flame wars in the 00s and how everyone thought attaching your real name to things on the internet would make everyone more civil, and actually what happened is racist grandpas took over the internet and advertising algorithms broke everyones brains
facebook is literally a portal to hell
@dankwraith
Hell just gets worse every year

@dankwraith I remember Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, and I think it was incredibly influential among those supporting real name policies.

"John Doe, Cashier at Local Grocery Store" commenting on news sites' Facebook comment plugins was an extreme disproof of that - turns out the correct fuckwad theory was "normal person + audience = total fuckwad".

@bhtooefr @dankwraith …not to mention that if you work at a grocery store, it’s not like the grocery store across the street won’t hire you if you get fired over online mob BS. That theory only works in environments where membership is not interchangeable.

@dankwraith @ajroach42 I think there's truth to the idea that people will be more civil when they aren't anonymous, problem is there's just so many people online, often in such crowded, unified forums as Twitter and Facebook and newspaper comments sections, that people *are* nonetheless effectively anonymous.

Smaller social circles where people are pseudonymous can actually solve this and function well in ways that huge crowds of eponymous folks can't.

@keithzg @ajroach42 yea i bet there's some truth to this
Internet trolls are even more hostile when they’re using their real names, a study finds

Anonymity, we assume, is the breeding ground for bad behavior on the internet. Not necessarily.

@radikalgrafitio Eh, even the synopsis in the article makes it seem far more complicated than that, and the headline there isn't really supported by the text.

@dankwraith one of the last things I saw on FB was a woman using her main account to argue for gas chambers for undocumented migrants, including children

Meanwhile, the real beneficiaries of real name policies have been pedos, because they have a far easier time finding and tracking victims

So it's a terrible fucking policy!