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 it 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…

Did anyone ever ask for the existence of AI shopping assistants, I wonder? No?

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.

was expecting https://files.ohai.social/media_attachments/files/110/572/540/754/559/825/original/6ef5db5a6eab7c39.png

Jes, kaj mi supozas, ke tiu chi parto de la fadeno estas nun proprajho de la Universala Esperanto-Asocio.

I am certainly convinced that TV, being purely passive, is more likely to have negative effects on cognition than online communities, which are something you can actively engage in and be creative.

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

Correction: you can do that. You shouldn’t because it’s beneficial for young people to have social contacts and belong to positive communities, which is very much enabled by social media!

Also the claim is that the reason this particular child is “stressed out” is:

He said girls especially are barraged with unrealistic and sometimes AI-generated images of women’s bodies at a time when they’re feeling especially self-conscious about their own bodies.

Now I was never a girl nor especially conscious about my body, I am a male nerd who quickly learned in school not to care what others thought of me too much…

But I remember around 15 to 20 years ago reading similar claims about youth magazines and advertisements, that they were promoting unhealthy and unrealistic ideas of an ideal body image. So the beauty and fashion industries or whoever didn’t need computers to do those things.

In both cases, “promoting an unhealthy body image” is literally just free speech which in the US enjoys broad constitutional protection. So the government has no business doing anything against it.

Probably just ask it for the seahorse emoji or something idk

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.