Twitter’s global guidelines lean toward Silicon Valley-style free speech absolutism, in which everybody has the right to speak and be heard (and never shadow-banned). Vulnerable users increasingly felt the effects of Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance, that if we include in a more tolerant discussion those who are less tolerant, they will prevent the discussion from being fully open. (Thus, in Popper's view, some level of "intolerance towards intolerance" must be exercised even by the tolerant.) In a 2021 report, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) bluntly stated that, "Surveying the current landscape of leading social media platforms, the entire sector is effectively unsafe for LGBTQ users." //

If you want to run an instance to bring local friends onto the Fediverse, the first question is which platform to base it on. Lemmer-Webber recommends that those who want a single- or few-user instance try Misskey. Pleorama, with a less discovery-focused project governance group, has its own how-to for installing it onto various flavors of Linux. Mastodon, as the incumbent, has some pre-built packages that offer a relatively turnkey setup, or follow the full step-by-step procedure. //

Kazemi is optimistic about coming full circle and using ActivityPub as the next RSS. "I hope it's even better. I hope it's even more widely adopted than RSS was back in its heyday," he said. While we chatted, he set up @ars_technica@rss.friend.camp, an ActivityPub actor republishing everything on Ars' main RSS feed; search for it from your Mastodon, Pleorama, or Misseky instance, follow it, and you can retire that RSS reader you keep only to check for Ars articles.