Firefox, Chrome, Edge, will all warn you about self-signed certs or cert mismatches but allow you to continue. You’re completely correct that SSL/TLS needs a certificate, but it doesn’t need to be CA issued or in any way legitimate for the encrypted tunnel to be established

You don’t really ‘need to’ in a world where a good proportion of people will happily click ‘continue anyway’ when they get any sort of certificate error

You’re right that they’re absolutely not the same, however at a nation state level, I’d be very surprised if you could point to any communist regime at any point in history that wasn’t also authoritarian or didn’t end up that way

I still see plenty of people I went to school with, and I’m 45 and live across the country. Maybe you don’t see anyone from school because they all remember you as the kid who stinks?

It’s cringey and awful

The term for subs on Lemmy is burrows, since that’s where lemmings live.

Absolutely not.

Unpopular opinion but defederating Meta is a terrible idea. What are people thinking will happen? Allow them to federate and you’ll have mastodon users able to view and interact with posts from Threads without needing to be concerned about ads or tracking, without giving over any more control of privacy than they would to any other fediverse instance, and without needing to possess accounts homed within the Meta infrastructure.

Defederate them, and anyone who wants to interact with anyone on threads will most likely need to maintain a presence on both and handover more personal data to Meta than they otherwise would.

Defederating is actively hostile to fediverse users.

I have a chrome plugin to strip any Pinterest results from searches, it’s the absolute worst