I've seen the randomized replacement text results here and there. Right now I'm getting some entertainment value from rereading my footprints before I scrub them, but I might look into that service.

The only reason I log in there now is to slowly erase my comment history.

Literal brownshirt-wannabes are not worth engaging on social media, and "don't feed the troll" has been an Internet aphorism since last century now

If you hadn't noticed, the oligarchy is waging a very aggressive culture war to keep the proles distracted from the equally aggressive class war. Bsky and fediverse services are under attack as they are not beholden to the oligarchy's censorship.

I hope that's a duck egg

To be clear - app isn't connecting to content service, web interface appears to be fine via browser

Putin's troll king puppet, on-brand as ever

Reddit CEO u/spez Huffman never shook his compromised past as r/Jailbait mod. If there's leverage for the regime to pressure Reddit's compliance with favorable content policy, I think it's connected to that.

It's also not a very far stretch to suppose that Ghislaine Maxwell's suspected account u/MaxwellHill, which was a resourceful driver of userbase and content development, connects Huffman to Jeffrey Epstein's suppressed guest lists.

You will never see an explicit announcement from a social media platform "so hay guise we're not allowed to criticize the regime, thanks for your cooperation". There won't be policy transparency.

I wouldn't want to cross paths with this guy simply because he sounds tedious and hollow

Since the odds are so slim of tariffs at this scale further boosting an economy that was already pretty vigorous - I think the more important question is, who are you going to scapegoat when tariffs don't work as advertised? Immigration? George Soros? Biden? Deep State? Panama and Greenland? Her emails? Will you swallow the doublethink when Murdoch and Bezos's fake news tell you a recession is really sort of a boom, and vodka rations are up 8%?

We knew that was coming when we saw Sundar Pichai in Oligarch Row at the inauguration

I was already iffy about Reddit since the r/place #fuckspez whitewashing. I was never suspended - but when I learned Luigi was suddenly an "unperson" topic there, I realized that commercialized social media is inherently compromised.

I'm not swearing off FB/Insta entirely just yet, but every time I visit them I'm more and more vividly aware how tedious Meta channels are.

Lots and lots of people, actually. Many identify with the tough-talkin' images being projected, believing it's just what the world needs and that the magic sorting hat will assign them to the privileged class when the dust settles.

You dodged a bullet. Ghosting demonstrates emotional irresponsibility.

This is your opportunity to decide for yourself, just how often is a reasonable frequency of check-ins? Maybe he's intentionally playing hard-to-get, maybe he's underconfident and fearful of initiating, mistaking passivity for being "chill" / approachable.

Initiating check-ins should feel somewhat evenly shared. If there are also other red flags this early in the getting-to-know-you stage, then yes just honor your intuition and leave the ball in his court. When I was dating, I checked in the day after a date, and then every 2-3 days thereafter. If you both have full schedules then maybe a week? You're not a bad person if a week between check-ins is too little connection for you.

In my defense, my family of origin revolved around a cookie cutter Atlas Shrugged minor villain dad - gaslighter, business cheat and mooch, compulsive womanizer - so Atlas Shrugged's heroes were the fantasy I needed when I read it. I knew I wasn't a "John Galt" so I tinkered with a dutiful Eddie Willers identity for a bit. Some good still came out of it - I got interested in philosophy as a respectable formal academic topic, and outgrew the fantasy.

If you've experienced abuse in one relationship, you're more likely to find yourself in subsequent abusive relationships. You 100% don't deserve abuse, but there are emotional habits that people learn in childhood that set us up to be especial targets for predatory partners.

I grew up witnessing my narcissist father cyclically abusing and neglecting my mother. With that baggage, in my late teens I was groomed into a manipulative relationship with a slightly older partner. I broke free after a few years, but this was all pre-Internet, so it was only much later that I learned the vocabulary to name narcissistic abuse flags and connected the dots. It was cyclical, and would almost certainly have turned physically abusive.

I think it's an oversimplification to say we tend to gravitate and feel special chemistry with people who recreate familiar (abusive) relationship patterns. There's a lot more complexity to romantic attraction and sexual attraction than just comfort/familiarity. I think there's usually more subtle, coded things going on that predators use to probe and groom targets - how we respond to a bigoted "joke", or two-faced cattyness, glorifying drugs and alcohol, etc.