Probably not. US international relations is heavily driven by an amoral power calculus.

Israel is a major foil to Iran. Iran is an ally of Russia and China and a threat to US interests in the region. Barring an extreme amount of pressure from constituents, which has not reached that threshold as far as I can tell, most US politicians will tolerate almost any human rights abuse from Israel.

When I say “by default”, I meant the vanilla Mastodon web client. Of course alternate clients could do just about anything.

There’s nothing in the text of the Constitution that says they don’t.

Like most sane people, I think that decision was overly broad and has dangerous implications. On the other hand, if Congress could make crimes about Article 2 powers, that would effectively allow Congress to take those powers for itself by statute, overruling the Constitution’s assignment of them to the president.

I could imagine them trying to include corporations… but seriously, Constitutional textualism is a cornerstone of what it means to be a conservative judge. They’re pretty content to ignore or reverse precedent, but not to get creative about something spelled out plainly in the Constitution.

the conservative SCOTUS will not overturn an unconstitutional law.

I think you might be surprised here. Conservative judges are inclined to follow the plain meaning of the text of the Constitution at the time it was written. There’s not much wiggle room in this:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

I don’t think long posts in Mastodon are a bad thing at all. I self-host and I changed the character limit to 50000.

By default, Mastodon will collapse long posts in feeds. If you don’t want to see long posts, you don’t have to click to expand them.

I’m puzzles as to why anyone would routinely post threads to Mastodon rather than moving to an instance without a short limit.

It’s kind of not. It does appear to be at least theoretically possible to self-host any or all of the major components. Unlike ActivityPub projects, however, it doesn’t seem like anybody is doing that and offering services to the public.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. What I do think is true is that there’s a chance some AI thing will be a trillion dollar investment, and the most motivating thing for VCs is fear of missing out on a giant score.

A nonprofit open source profit ought to have different motivations though.

That’s pretty much what I wrote in the comment box. The options for the multiple choice questions don’t really acknowledge that as a preference people might have.

Yes. I use it to post pictures of birds.

Discovery built into Mastodon and ActivityPub microblogging in general isn’t great (and some people claim that’s a good thing). One place to look for people to follow is https://fedi.directory/

It’s absolutely an issue for hobby level open source projects.

It looks like you have to have a paid Apple developer account to do it.

Probably some actual racists and a whole bunch of people who thought it would be funny to embarrass Microsoft by getting it to say the most offensive thing they could imagine.

That’s interesting. This post had suggested it isn’t yet possible to host an AppView. It seems the reality is more complex.

Whether it soon becomes possible to self host an AppView, the one remaining centralized component will tell us a lot about where it’s headed.

ATProto is almost there with the only missing piece being the AppView. I’m not sure if BlueSky is hesitant about releasing theirs as open source, but I don’t think there are any barriers to a third party implementing one.

It’s almost certainly the number of candidates. On the other hand, top three out of a much smaller number doesn’t present voters with a lot of choice.

Local elections also need to be partisan. Otherwise how the fuck do you know where any of the candidates even generally stand on the issues?

I’d rather parties have no official role so we’re actually voting for people to represent us. Candidates have a responsibility to get their message out, and voters have a responsibility to do some research.

The story buries the lede: there were 19 candidates on the ballot for mayor and 16-30 for each city council district. Several of the experts cited speculate that the number of candidates overwhelmed voters.

I always go over a sample ballot in advance and research each candidate. I would not have liked to do so for that election; local elections are difficult to research in general with many candidates getting minimal press and some not even bothering to put up websites.