Chris Trottier2d ago

Multiple people “reported” me for this post showing a screenshot of Donald Trump literally comparing himself to Jesus Christ.

First off, that report ultimately goes to me—the owner of my instance. There is no higher authority on atomicpoet.org than me. Which is by design.

Supposedly, the issue is that you didn’t “consent” to seeing a post about Trump. But nobody “consents” prior to a post going public. That’s not how social media works. There’s no Fediverse Authority to decide which posts publicly hit the federated timeline.

Even so, I firmly believe there are things that need to be seen—whether people like it or not. And one of them is that Donald Trump literally put up an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, in a white robe and red cloak, surrounded by worshippers. One of them is praying to him.

If this offends you, good. It should. It offends me too. Everyone should be offended. If you’re religious in any way—Christian or otherwise—you should react with profound distaste. And if you’re an atheist, yeah, you should also be offended. This should be a universally offensive thing.

I therefore refuse to hide that image behind a content warning because, yeah, everyone needs to know it exists.

RE: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/f3e63850-d50a-43af-81ac-cedd4861f9f1

Show threadKichae

Chris Trottier I have some pretty far-out-there hopes for how I’d like to see the fesiverse structured, which will never be realized baased on discussions I’ve had, but which seem so obviously necessary. These hopes revolve around an instance-first framework, focusing on instance-as-community, which includes having the Local feed as the default for most fedi sites.

This is one of the key reasons why. There’s a pretty wild entitlement people seem to have over what rules, social or formal, are expected on fedi, even though it is an informal, opt-in, subscription based network. Ensuring your first point of contact each day is set to the same baseline as you radically changes the expectations, as does viewing your instance as a website and as the primary mediator in your interactions, rather than just a neutral conduit to “Mastodon”.

But, alas, the idea of the content network, rather than the omni-app,seems anathema to people these days.

Apr 13 at 11:02amWeb