If I delete this post, will it be completely removed across all instances that synchronized it?

It will send out a message to relevant servers that it should be deleted. There is no guarantee that they will comply with that message. If your post has been copied to hundreds or thousands of other servers, there is no guarantee that they will all receive or understand that message. Some may even be actively malicious, for example because they are controlled by exactly the people you want to hide from!

I remember once deleting a comment (on this account) a few seconds after posting it. After that, I kept getting upvotes for it! I found out that that was happening because one very popular instance had for some reason not deleted the comment, so its users had no idea that it was supposed to be gone.

Is a deleted post traceable in any way?

Everything on the public Internet is. Anyone can set up a bot that just scrapes and archives everything on the Internet that they can find; and governments certainly have the resources to do so!

Is it kept in a log or a database on ferdiverse instances?

Potentially.

With governments across the globe increasingly surveiling us online and scrutinizing everything we say, I’m starting to think I should plainly delete any account that has personally identifiable information like my real name and photo. I initially thought it would be easier to connect with family and friends, but now I’m growing increasingly worried about how this can be used against me.

Posting things on the public Internet, especially under one’s real name, inherently comes with that risk. Always has.

so we finally solved https://xkcd.com/949/ I guess?

Where I live, gift cards are still very widely available.

Sounds like getting rid of Steam gift cards won’t solve that problem, they can do the same with other gift cards or even entirely different methods. Is that worth it to exclude minors or other people with no other way to pay?

What scams were those?

The main people impacted by this will be minors with no other way to buy anything from Steam…

I think there are things we need some sort of state for… but certainly think its power should be limited so that it can’t do things like what this thread is about!

I agree with that (unlike the other answer I got to this; yeah, Soviet-aligned states were definitely very free societies amirite /s), but then again, sometimes there are more or less successful movements toward more freedom. The history of the 20th century alone is that of the century ending with much more freedom in the world than there was during most of it. How have we completely forgotten those values?

Why does humanity have to keep fighting the same fights against different governments over and over again?

Cannot governments, for once, be even slightly on the side of a free society?

Because there’s no good reason to do that that justifies the cost and effort.

Hard forks are generally fairly rare, e.g. you could ask the same about the Linux kernel…

which is however not a fork, either hard or soft, of anything

Pretty sure that compared to NetBSD, Linux still runs on relatively few architectures. 😝

News outlets, for example, could spin up a server on their own official domain, and provide accounts to employees. So someone posting from a @news.bbc.com instance could, at a glance, be understood to be a genuine BBC reporter.

Some already do that. The ones I am familiar with are in German though: social.heise.de and mastodon.derstandard.at.

Do you have an example of that?

OSM doesn’t do this, but there are freely licensed satellite images out there. Usually they are produced by or for national governments and often ended up freely licensed precisely because OSM people asked for that…

For my country this is basemap.at and it would actually be an interesting project to aggregate such things in one UI, but I am not aware anyone has done that yet.

I do use it, but you are quite right I don’t tend to mention it unless asked.

Probably just ask it for the seahorse emoji or something idk

On the Vatican website I can find translations into various languages, but not the presumably original Latin. Does anyone know why that is so and whether that is online somewhere?

Yes. If vendors in those states want to then preinstall Linux on a device they would have to find a compliant distro…

Doesn’t matter much. At least those of us who aren’t engaged in the business of selling computers are unaffected.

Considering SteamOS includes Valve’s proprietary bits for the Steam client, this likely still applies to Valve and any hardware shipping with SteamOS

Where is the line? Most Linux distros have some nonfree software too, does it apply to them?

IMHO the correct legal and constitutional analysis ought to be: distributing software, in either source or binary form, is free speech protected under the US constitution as well as state constitutions. Therefore the government cannot pass laws requiring that operating systems, in general, implement certain features, doesn’t matter which.

What the government can do is engage in product regulation. It can require that operating systems preinstalled on devices sold in their jurisdiction have certain features. The correct thing to do wouldn’t have been to distinguish FOSS from nonfree operating systems, but operating systems preinstalled on devices from those distributed on the Internet which the user needs to install. That would have covered Android, iOS, macOS and Windows, which is obviously what the legislators were thinking of.

IRC prank from the 2000s: if you type /quit playing games with my heart you’ll hear a cool pop song.

2020s: if you type quit into Google it will understand this as an AI prompt.