The point of my hypothetical is that communicable diseases have a tendency to evolve to be less pathogenic over time.

That’s not actually a real thing. It was a theory by a guy in the 1800s that’s been soundly debunked but spread because people want to believe it’s true.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/08/facebook-posts/viruses-and-other-pathogens-can-evolve-become-more/

And notably they’re not really two entirely unrelated things. “SARS” is SARS-CoV-1 and “COVID” is SARS-CoV-2.

Office buildings are test tubes, schools are petri dishes.

Polling generally showed Democrats supporting masking by a massive margin. The most recent poll I could find (April 2022) had support for mandatory masking on public transportation among Democrats as 80-5.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/majority-of-americans-support-mask-mandates-for-travel-ap-poll-finds

What’s the point of this hypothetical? It’s both not remotely close to where we are currently and has redefined the consequences to absurdity.

“Would you still wear a mask if the consequence of infection was a single light sneeze?”

“Would you wear a seat belt if the only consequence of car crashes was a small bruise?”

And those were the good old days when they were just trying to be subtly racist, rather than the now times where they’re just straight up trying to smuggle Nazi dog whistles in.

And pair that with the government saying it’s mostly killing old people and those with health issues then just declaring it over. I wasn’t expecting lockdown forever, but just like keeping it as an ongoing health concern. Instead they’ve been wiping their site of tracking, dropping funding, and abandoning workers to just hope their employer isn’t going to get them sick. COVID being over is good politically and good for business, so COVID is over.

It’s not like the rich countries are self-evidently sober and stable in their politics and climate impacts. The richest one just had their own wannabe fascist and has both been responsible for a large part of emissions and rarely met their climate goals.

Fucking lol. This has to trolling too. No chapo could possibly be surprised people think of them as trolls. Most of them are proud of it.

This is the same argument about banning on Reddit, but as a former mod, my experience is that very few people will actually go through the effort to spin up an alt to keep trolling. A handful will (we had one person who put a note in their calendar to send a “mean” modmail every month for a weirdly long time), but most are just lazy bored posters who have fun messing with people they don’t like, and if they can’t conveniently browse their targets for opportunities, they’ll just go do something else they find fun rather than go through the effort. Despite accounts being basically free and meaningless, banning trolls was unexpectedly effective.

CTH did more than just troll, but doing something in addition to trolling doesn’t make you not a troll. Most of the rest of Reddit didn’t experience the fun in-sub content, they just experienced its trolling and brigading, and we don’t need to pretend that Hexbear and r/CTH aren’t largely one and the same. They don’t need federation to do the internal culture stuff you’re waxing poetic about, they need federation to troll.

And I couldn’t care less whether calling CTH or your thousands of friends trolls is going to make you hostile. THEY were hostile to other people because it was fun for them. The trolling is already here via the OP. It’s tiresome and just degrades forums for their targets and everyone not in on the joke trying to figure out what their issue is. You guys don’t get to spend years trolling reddit just to say “we have a new name now, so you can’t judge us on our prior actions”.

Maybe admins will wait and see. If somehow it isn’t a huge source of trolling then I fully support federating. But I’m going to say I don’t think the odds are good. And if the admins do what you expect and don’t go back and revisit the choice I can’t say I’m going to think it’s a huge loss.

Alternately make non-troll leftists join a non-troll instance if they want to just go out into the wider Fediverse without the stigma. Once they federate they won’t have to be on the CTH-successor instance, they’re choosing to be there. Like I said in my other reply to you, I don’t find the lemmygrad users nearly as trollish as CTH was. It’s not the ideology that’s the problem, it’s the trolling, and they’re pre-announcing they won’t do anything to curb trolling by their users.

CTH wasn’t just a sub that happened to have some users who also trolled, they frequently organized and bragged about trolling and brigading there. And while mods need to be ready to ban individual trolls, it’s also a volunteer activity and not dealing with a rotating cast of trolls or massive brigades could be worth shutting out some posters who wouldn’t be a problem themselves. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable stance to say “wait and see if it’s a problem”, but I also don’t think it’s an unreasonable stance to say “we know what’s likely going to happen, we’re not robots who have to pretend we were born yesterday”.

I don’t really mind lemmygrad users. They’re often pretty tankie, but I don’t see much trolling from them. They state their opinion about China/Russia and frequently get downvoted, but I haven’t seen them explicitly try to be disruptive to communities/people they don’t like.

Eh, so be it. CTH made its own bed and in the thread talking about federating users are demonstrating why people should be skeptical of the value of federating with a troll-prone instance. The mods of CTH back in the day also sometimes asked their users to behave themselves, it didn’t really work. And since their admins have explicitly said they won’t police trolling elsewhere, it’s really nothing more than a passing suggestion.

In an ideal world, lemmy.world waits and sees if they’re really committed to keeping their shit on local. In a non-ideal world never federating with instances extremely likely to troll is also a pretty good choice.

So sadly the Russians are the only ones who enter the „finding out“.

Counterpoint: It’s not sad that there isn’t going to be a war, whether or not it might be humiliating to an authoritarian regime.

CTH was kind of a problematic sub (quite separate from the claimed “don’t be mean to slaveholders” reason for their banning), so I’m not really opposed to not welcoming a mirror of a sub known for brigades and trolling other communities with open arms. Maybe their new administration/moderation/community is better, but lemmy.world can always federate after they’ve demonstrated that elsewhere.

Post karma and comment karma don’t map to questions and answers though. Maybe in some very specific subs posting=questions, but most post karma is posting links and memes.

It doesn’t really seem like they’re accounting for the fact that this means that the participant candidates are going to skew towards people that are overweight, which is like the 2nd highest risk factor for cancer generally.

You say this based on what exactly? Because that’s a trivial thing to correct for in an observational study.

I’m not real sure how much the Threads Algorithm is going to pass through Mastodon content (and even less sure if it will even be able to pass through Lemmy content). I think the much more valuable aspect is you can pitch your Threads friends that they can move to the Fediverse and actually get to choose what content they see rather than which influencers paid Meta to fill up your feed.