it not only is absolutely and completely technically, socially, legally, and practically impossible to achieve both of "verified personhood credentials" and "strong protections for anonymity" (and no, whatever complex cryptographic system you're designing in your head is not a viable solution),

oh god I knew you were going to pivot to the real names/verified identities thing eventually because it's fucking inevitable. Allow me to repeat the actual facts for the millionth time: It does not fucking work.

The classic example: people always suggest that a site can reduce abuse by requiring everyone to register with or use their "real names" and that would mean a far more civil environment. In reality, "real names" is the option that produces the *most* abuse.

It's a hard job with a million tradeoffs, and people who have never done it think there are simple and obvious solutions that a site is just refusing to implement because, I dunno, they're evil or something. When in reality, those simple and obvious solutions don't work. Or make things worse.

There is no universe in which "having to take a 72-hour break from a niche microblogging site with an obsession with the theoretical penis of an 80s sitcom muppet" is within several thousand degrees of severity of "being murdered by cops for walking while Black."

The pneumatic tubes analogy by @maximolly.bsky.social is much more fun

100 years ago there was a tram in both directions down the middle of Linthorpe Road, and space for bikes, cars and pedestrians.

Choral Evensong is still free at Westminster Abbey and St Pauls

Sesame Street was never any good at teaching reading, which brings me back to Sarah's point about literacy on text-based platforms earlier in the week.
But then I'm old enough to remember when retweets were a jarring disruption to people's sense of who they were expecting to see in their feed.

Yikes. Round here the huge puddles are usually around drains

Do you have a garden fork to clear the leaves out of the drains in the street?

This Arena on The Clash set around New Year 1977 is well worth a look for the weird cultural context we took for granted at the time: youtu.be/k_HszocRxSg?...

Could you use a star emoji instead? kevinmarks.com/notinourstars

They used to roll out new emoji in each release…

It's the kind of question that works well on a site like this when you want a human answer, if you can describe the things a bit