I did. I was pretty active on NoStupidQuestions there. I called another user a fascist sanewasher because he was claiming Musk’s Nazi Salute at the inauguration was perfectly normal and something every politician does all the time. Within 15 minutes of me posting my comment I got a 7 day ban from the sub. Less than a day later I got perma-banned from Reddit completely. I hadn’t even commented or posted anything between getting the 7 day ban and the perm-ban.

I also had an alt account which I hadn’t used in a few years. I logged into that and found it was also permbanned, referencing my other account.

A couple of weeks later I got a new laptop (unrelated). I downloaded a new browser I’d never used on any device before (Brave), turned on my VPN and created a new Reddit account using a burner email address. Within a day, before I even posted or commented anything, the new account got permabanned and they referenced my other account. I don’t know how they knew it was me. It was a device that had never logged into my old accounts, in a browser that advertises itself as secure and that I had never used before, on a VPN so they weren’t matching my IP address. I’m clearly permanently banned, though.

Cannabis

It all needs to get a lot less complex and confusing. I know the complexity is a byproduct of the defederated nature of the whole thing, but it’s also the primary thing limiting growth. The fediverse is never going to grow to anything other than a tiny niche if it isn’t immediately understandable to people who have 0 background in tech.

Mental asylums as they existed in the US before the 80s were often little more than glorified prisons. They did all kinds of horrific things to people which today we would consider torture.

That said, most people (not all, but most) who were in mental asylums were there because they had very real issues they needed real treatment for. Most people were not getting the treatment they needed, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t need something.

The mental asylums absolutely needed a lot of reform. Most probably did need to be shut down, or, at the very least, the entire staff needed to change and they needed a completely new philosophy of care. What this country absolutely did NOT need is to just throw all those people out onto the streets to fend for themselves. It seems to have been a lateral change for the people who needed help and a negative change for the rest of the country.

I’m not sure I would use the term “mental asylum” as that has a lot of cultural connotations I don’t think we need or want to bother with. However, I do think the federal government should provide massive amounts of block grant funding to states to open new facilities which can provide inpatient services to people who suffer with mental health problems. These should be founded on a care-first framework, not the torture prisons of yore.