It’s just simple abuse. It’s no more complicated that that. Trump is not some genius, he’s just an abusive asshole with a megaphone.

The whole point is to constantly be testing the loyalty of supporters, while punishing detractors. For the supporters, the constant “attention” is a reward. Every opportunity to say “there are three lights” is making themselves part of the lie. For the rest of us, the constant, unavoidable gaslighting is exhausting, and the visible, ever present degradation of our civic institutions is horrifying. Yet we are forced to either witness it and confront it day after day if we are to oppose it, or check out and let it happen, just hoping it ends quickly.

People are naive if they think the .ml admins and devs don’t intend to keep their thumb on the Lemmy scale. More instances need to take this threat seriously and defederate from .ml, and possibly even fork the Lemmy repos for when the devs inevitably decide they want to start building quiet exploits into the code. There are serious cyber security implications here that people are sleeping on

One guy spends a summer implementing a backprop algorithm in CUDA and now my mom thinks butterflies are stealing her blood at night.