I don;t know about your friends but I had the glum task of removing a Misfits patch from my battle jacket when I found that out :(
Trouble is Andy, we now know what you privately think and all the follow up statements in the world can't put that genie back in the bottle.
Proton is an org that exists in an industry whose customers do not trust easily. Publicly aligning with someone utterly untrustable, either as an individual or as a board, has tainted Proton and adversely affected peoples ability to trust. How can we ever know when Proton will find it acceptable again to respond positively to a Trumpian decision or how it might affect our privacy?
If you decide to not use StickerMule again, as the org I'm part of now has, I'd suggest that rather than simply not using them to login to your SM account, then contact them via their Support interface and ask them to remove your account and all data associated with it or direct them to tell you how you can do it yourself and end by telling them exactly why.
Maybe pay teachers enough that they don't have to do this if they don't want to?
And if they do want to, how does it affect their efficacy as a teacher?
Clearly incorrect as no one would be sad.
It's amazing how many snowflake comedians start crying about being cancelled and then go on to have numerous netflix specials about it. Almost like they were never actually cancelled in the first place but they learnt that if they said they were enough times, the terminally dim people who enjoy their material will pay money to see their bully fantasies played out on stage by an old rich guy.
It is different. I had cause to go back a week or two ago to look for an old post of mine and I did have a bit of a poke about in my old subs too. It was like a war zone. Blatant no fucks given racism, incel level women hating, transphobia and ableism of the most vitriolic kind. And these weren't just the massive general subs, some of them were niche interest subs where I felt I belonged at the time. Has it changed to become like that since June or was I just so used to it before that that I'd never noticed how toxic it was? Did I just used to shrug and say to myself 'well, that's just reddit'. Literally everyone seemed angry and hateful.
I'm not claiming the fediverse is perfect or free from that sort of shit but either through the practicalities of federation, or better moderation or a smaller userbase or a more mature userbase or a mix of one or more of those things it doesn't feel exclusionary to me. I often see on posts like this some people calling Lemmy a left-wing echo chamber and whilst I do agree there's more people of a left-wing bent on here I think echo chamber is a bit much and is a phrase maybe used by those who live in a country without a functioning left-wing political party. I've not encountered a communist or tankie since Hexbear fucked off back to their kindergarten.
As for the Guardian article, they've fallen into the same trap as I'm concerned the fediverse might fall into by federating with Meta - assuming high numbers equal success or victory. If you have corporate/economics based mindset I can see how that works, but to me success equals a popular, useful community site entirely free from algorithms and other forms of manipulative control. One that isn't gathering data via ads and tracking on its userbase to sell on (lets remember that reddit weren't upset that AI were scraping reddit, they were upset that the company weren't seeing any money from that). A community that grows organically, with all that that implies - sometimes growth might be very slow, it might stop entirely for awhile, maybe even reverse - but the emphasis should be on the people making the community better.
Reddit forgot somewhere along the way that it was the users who made reddit what it was. Look at the stats for r/askreddit - in particular the posts per day and comments per day - look at the trend since 2020. There may well be the same amount of users on reddit, but we all know a certain percentage of them are bots and even if they weren't, just looking at those two graphs tells you everything about people's level of interest in participating on reddit.
The only thing high user numbers guarantee sites like reddit is ad revenue. Nothing else.
Elon: "100% free speech, always!"
MediaMatters: "Here's evidence Musk is an antisemite."
Elon: "I'm suing you for speaking freely!"
Elon is slowly but surely tearing down everything he has ~~created~~
Bought.
Just a reminder to my American friends that everyone was absolutely positive there was no way Trump would get elected in 2016. You sleptwalked into a near dictatorship because everyone agreed the idea that he could win was a big joke. There's very real possibility that a refusal to believe he can do it again will mean he does do it again. And if he does, I don't think it'll be a near dictatorship you have to live in.
Read the headline: yes mate, she is.
Read the post: Perfectly understandable, carry on.
Not sure we ever left.