On a very related note, I've been seeing a lot of what I coined as "schizophrenic design" in technology over the past 10 years. I started using this term to describe technology making you question yourself or the state of the system.

Did I just get shadowbanned or does no one find my posts interesting? Am I shadowbanned or are my posts just deranked but still visible? Why does changing my profile picture trigger me to now require a phone to continue using the website? Did it mark me as a spambot or is this a normal sign up procedure? Did I get banned or did the group get deleted? Did I really forget to untick that "I'd like to receive marketing" checkbox?

I can't really put my thumb on it. Now imagine this stuff with personalization and algorithms that know you're pregnant before you do. If anything, food intake is probably a very high quality signal on biological changes such as pregnancy.

If you don't control the technology, the technology controls you.

Someone, please, for the love of all that is holy: Set up a website with information on how to reach emergency services from x to y country. People are literally dying here.

I once tried to call an ambulance on an active suicide attempt in the United States (while I myself was in Europe).

Problem 1: What number should I call? My country's national emergency line could not help and had no direct communication with ANY emergency services in the USA. Unable to find the phone number for EMS in the USA, I called the local police department which was answering their regular phone line at that time.

Problem 2: This requires long distance calling and local police departments do not accept collect calls.

Problem 3: Police receptionist was hesitant to connect me to dispatch but did so anyways.

Problem 4: I am now easily 10-20 minutes into making an emergency phone call and I haven't even talked to anyone able to help me.

Problem 5: Ambulance took another 10-15 minutes to even show up.

I explicitly stated "they just took pills, they have no neurological symptoms right now, do not leave immediately."

Problem 6: Ambulance left after a simple "it's a prank call" given at the front door.

Not much later, this person started showing severe neurological symptoms. I repeated the call, told them they were now actively dying and needed help. Luckily an ambulance came and helped this person, but it was an incredibly close call.

Zero responsibility? You are always responsible for the things you say, both morally and legally, both here and elsewhere. Even in public spaces like town squares or hn comment sections. (hn sux, lmao.)

If a chat gets toxic by your standards, just leave. No one forces you to stay in a chat where you don't want to be. On the other hand, governments do censor and scan your private messages. Good cryptography and trustable software mitigates that partially but not entirely. Privacy and autonomy are fundamental human rights. Seemingly, the only way to enforce them is by exercising your rights and holding your government accountable.

I'd rather be abused by a toxic community I can willingly leave than be abused by a toxic government who can take my voice away, imprison me or worse. They can do that to anyone at any time. Laws like SLAs are worth the paper they're written on. And so software that prioritizes censorship-free speech is a tradeoff to be made and cannot be personally made -- it has to be made as a group. (Software like anything else can still be outlawed!)

The recent events with governments eroding privacy, consumer rights and other rights is a good reason to be wary and a good reason to get active and start exercising those rights.

Re: moderation. I don't know about the moderation tools of Xeres, but it seems trivial to be able to boot people from the chat.

Use your free speech to be kind to one another.