The second wave of arrests was almost entirely students, because Columbia has been on lockdown and it’s been increasingly difficult for non-students to get in in the first place. The “outside agitators were at fault” narrative that Columbia is pushing is at odds with this.

No - semantic satiation is when you read or hear a word so much in a short timeframe that it stops feeling like a real word, and briefly feels like just a jumble of letters/sounds.

The pledge of allegiance, not the anthem. But yes, it was every day. Although, where I grew up, it was never enforced, and most kids didn’t stand or participate.

Hexbear only recently started opening itself up to federation. It’s one of the old leftist instances that was around before the reddit api fiasco. Think lemmygrad but more tolerant and pro-lgbtq.

Huh, okay. Good on you for being consistent.

I find the banning of individual users to be highly necessary, to prevent spam of porn/nazi shit/general assholery. Instead of everyone having to spend a long time forming their own blocklist, they can sign up for an instance with a mod team that they trust to do it for them. Defederation is a useful tool towards that end, because (for example) Exploding Heads is an instance that explicitly allows racism and such, so a well-moderated instance will defederate with them rather than having to ban hundreds or thousands of individual trolls who sign up over there because they like racism.

Are you also against the idea of banning individual users for the content they post?

The true mission of Lemmy is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable :)