Slackware, OpenBSD, and a bit of a Debiantard. FOSS and Privacy Advocate.

08 Dec – 12 Dec 2022

rPi sets the snot nosed kiddies straight

A lesson in reality for little Marxist children

Was it the enticing aroma from pigs in a blanket?

Okay so PR folks do that thing where their reach exceeds their grasp. Maybe this is one of those times, and maybe not. It does however, illustrate the pent-up teenage angst and folly of adults subjugated by adolescent mob psychology.

It's factual enough to say that rPi was dogpiled by miscreants triggered by virtue of not having validated demands of idiots who think that pictures of 🍗🐔 🍖🥓🥩🐄🐖 should have a content warning (please block and/or defederate yourself, or your Fediverse instance – no one likes you anyway, nobody cares what you think, and no one will miss you when you've vanished into the ether).

Hiring an innovative maker is s good thing.

So rPi hired an ex-cop. So fricken' what? Big deal.

This is how you can tell they're miscreants. A company hires someone with expertise in a field where the product does exceedingly well in sales and deployment applications and a bunch of spoiled children either begin to dogpile because of the wise company decision, or because they're not finished attacking the company out of sport stemming from their bloodlust to agitate. It's a common past time – one that people who enjoy mostly peaceful riots and arson can all agree upon: “It's fun to burn other people's stuff down and bludgeon them!”

Defending your integrity is not cool, bruh! I'mma cancel you.

Yeah. This is where the rubber meets the road actually, and where the irony of it all is exposed – naked. As in, Look mommy! The Emporer has no clothes!

  1. ) The first irony

If you don't like someone, you've always had ordinary controls over what you're going to permit in your inbox (feed/stream/wall). You can simply mute, block, or otherwise choose to let your machine disappear them “infernal undesirable types” on your own behalf for your personal account.

Problem resolved.

Not quite, you say? Well now here's where the insidious nature of these bolshevik social justice warriors start to flex their evil ulterior motives – if they don't like somebody, it's not enough that they make that other person disappear, they want you to make them disappear too.

What's even more despicable than that? I'm glad you asked!

They also want to take away your ability to make those decisions for yourself. They want the powers that be (instance admins) to defederate themselves from the entire other Fediverse instance where that person they don't like has their account.

Now that's ridiculous – but it's how a filthy Communist thinks. Bolsheviks rule by fear and terror (they murdered the mensheviks) – that's why wherever you see something like this it almost always includes doxing and death threats from the community by people that say they're so against that in their terms of service in the first place.

I know. It makes no sense. Oh, the irony.

Okay, I guess they're just guidelines, not rules for them, only rules for others.

  1. ) The second irony

It's called, “Painting yourself into a corner”, and these children, with their knee-jerk reactions to edit their MRF settings are only doing a couple of things.

Nothing pisses off a hater more than to be summarily dismissed, knowing that their bigotry and enmity will never again cloud the skies of those they have fixated their projections for their own self-loathing.

So next they begin to bully their own instance admins. A few outcomes are likely...

The smart money is on the second scenario. A modicum of civility is in order here. Trolling, hate, doxing, and ad hominem are certainly against the AUP/ToS/CoC/Rules – whatever you call yours, and these self-loathing haters have absolutely broken the tenants of their social contact with you.

Sure, those types of behaviors do warrant a ban, but you're a seasoned Admin, having managed a lot of public forums over the years, and you know it's probably best to give them a warning in lieu of a ban for this first offense and avoid them engaging in the same type of fruitless campaign against the good users of your community Fediverse instance... Coz these kinds of entitled subversives live for that, and again, you know this from experience – there is nothing new here.

But there first option works too. You just don't know where those cockroaches will next come at you from. But just like what started this whole thing? You know you can just filter their voices out and be done with them.

The third option is probably the most disturbing, because that admin is an enabler and wants to be liked – at the expense of her own users. She will continue to appease these evil people until almost all of her users have moved their accounts to Fediverse instances that are vibrant, happy communities, and she will wonder whatever it was she could have done that was so wrong.

Now I like the sort of server administrator that is so immature and reactionary that he is just looking for a reason to pull the trigger – these are often, but not always, overwhelmingly of the teenage demographic. It really means very little to them when they disregard their userbases and pull the lever. They are in congruence with the haters hammering the report button and demanding that this instance defederates from the object of their bloodlust; they also relish their growing #fediblock list as a collection of trophies – for them, the Fediverse is sport, s blood sport, yet they don't comprehend that “In space, no one can hear you scream”

Eventually, they actually do find themselves in the vacuum of space, having completely defederated themselves from the Fediverse, save for a few instances of ascerbic, hateful bigots; all of the nice, upstanding citizenry of their userbase has long since migrated away.

These pathetic sort of sdmin types discover their personal echo chambers are nothing more than a few whispers here and there, with the memory of the ghosts that once made it a vibrant and engaging community – people from all walks of life, engaged in civil discourse....

So they close down the server, and get a job bagging groceries at the local market because their parents want them to finally move out.

The aftermath

But what about our naive little hater admin?

Eventually, the paint in her bedroom dried, and she was able to get out from the corner of self-imposed exile in her bedroom, get that job bagging groceries, growing into a fine adult, and contributing member of society.

She went for her MS in electrical engineering, got a job as a C-Level suit, married, and is now raising three children with her wife. Her future is bright. She grew up – that's what most kids eventually do. And she now commands a healthy modicum of decorum.

She's also her own patriarchy, but she takes turns filling the responsibility of that role with her wife, sometimes delegating that responsibility to their oldest child while they're working long hours, and he just got his driver's license so he can take his siblings to games and practices...

But he's still a little bit immature – kinda like she used to be. 🙂

whatever became of Raspberry Pi?

Why, what do you mean whatever happened? After all the evil haters removed themselves from federation, life simply went on as before. Sure. There were issues, mostly related to supply chain issues, but that only increased demand, and the good folks that brought us computers for under fifty bucks did their very best to keep prices down during those precarious times too.

And everybody still loves them. The good people on those Fediverse instances administered by stupid people? Well they all found other servers that weren't being run by assholes, or got really enlightened and deployed smallweb single user Fediverse instances with no regrets.

And that ex-cop they hired? Well that guy introduced a brand new line of FOSS based rPi packages and kits for residential customers, empowering homeowners and ranchers to setup easy turnkey surveillance networks to protect their own property, safeguard their families, all without having to be afraid of how evil deprecated legacy silos (like Google and Amazon) were themselves engaging in government sponsored surveillance of their own customers!

Everyone was happy, and we ate from bowls of porridge that weren't too hot, weren't too cold, but were just right.

And we all lived happily ever after...

Except for the bolsheviks – they're still hating themselves and projecting that hatred towards everyone else. But fuck 'em. They've painted themselves into a corner.

Epilog

Nope. That's it. Nothing else really to add to any of that. It's all just common sense.

Wait! I did forget something.

I might be tempted to say it sucks to be you, but that would be mean spirited, and if you're a #newcomer, you probably didn't know any better anyway. So you can just deal with it like all other Mastodon users have to when people format their articles in #Markdown, or try one of the other solutions below:

brief list of Markdown enabled Fediverse servers

https://Btrf.ly

https://join.misskey.page/en-US/instances

https://JoinTheFedi.com

https://Soapbox.Pub

https://Mitra.Social

https://Friendi.ca

https://Quanta.Wiki

https://FediDB.org/software

https://WriteFreely.org

And much more!

impetus

I was compelled to publish this article in the Fediverse after reading the following article (because it got pretty much everything wrong), and also the buzzfeed interview article it linked to:

https://eiara.nz/posts/2022/Dec/09/a-case-study-on-raspberry-pis-incident-on-the-fediverse/

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/chrisstokelwalker/raspberry-pi-hired-ex-cop-mastodon-controversy