The great thing about the fediverse is that it is harder to censor: as long as you find one instance where you can publish some information, you can publish it.

The bad thing about the fediverse is that it is also harder to moderate: as long as a spammer or troll finds one instance from which they can send unwanted messages, they will be able to send them.

so rich and can’t afford a keyboard with a working capslock key

I wasn’t really familiar with it before this post. Seems it is just an instance full of bots relaying RSS feeds to Lemmy? I think that can certainly be useful, but I also think the structure of Mastodon is more suitable for reading RSS feeds than that of Lemmy, so I think I’m going to keep reading RSS feeds through https://rss-parrot.net/ (and sometimes post things to appropriate Lemmy communities if I think more people should see them).

I used to think that but for “anyone born in a year after my birth year”, but now I look at some such people and realize that all people eventually turn older. :/ OP is a lot younger than even that though.

Here’s what I wish people had explained to me when I was approximately your son’s age and which should cover most of what he’s going through:

(I am assuming your son is heterosexual. If he is not, then you have to change this somewhat, but I can’t help you with that very much because I’m heterosexual myself.)

You probably noticed that for a few years now, when you look at or think of girls, your penis gets hard and much bigger; this is because you started puberty. That is called an erection and is a completely normal thing to happen; it’s your body telling you that it would like you to have sex with that girl. Erections will immediately go away when you ejaculate, which is a completely normal and very pleasurable thing to do. You can ejaculate without having sex with anyone by masturbating, that is, by rubbing your penis against your hands or some other object. It helps to think of beautiful girls when doing that. I have no problem at all with you doing this and you will never get in trouble for doing it or asking anyone any questions about it, but I insist that you do it when no one is watching, preferably in your own room.

What are you preparing in the microwave? Quite possibly the answer is both.

A few weeks ago there was a screenshot going around “I met my wife in a github issue thread”.

Yes, but then you can have malicious servers sending fake numbers without other server operators being able to check whether this is at all plausible.

(It’s still possible for malicious servers to send fake votes, but server operators can see which users they are stated to originate from, then block that server if that looks like it’s doing that. At least that is my understanding.)

Yes, after all other servers need this information in order to prevent double voting, you can’t just have servers sending each other information “somebody upvoted this” and also tell when servers are allowing users to vote more than once.

So upvotes and downvotes aren’t actually private, never have been, some servers may display them publicly even if most don’t.

Yup, I realize that too when looking at a map of it. Still, the only place on that lake I can name off the top of my head is Chicago and several times in my life already, my brain already went “and that’s on Lake Michigan, so it’s in Michiga– no, riiiiiight, it’s in Illinois”.

honestly as a non-American, this would unironically make things less confusing: the largest city on that lake is Chicago and I always have to consciously remember “that city is in Illinois, but the lake it is on is called Lake Michigan”.

I don’t think that would be any better. It is still compulsory service and a violation of people’s individual freedoms to choose how to live their lives.

(and many countries do allow that as an alternative e.g. for conscientious objectors)