HarkMahlberg

The US has a greater obsession with tattoos than Japan by this point. If you go to a place in Japan and show off a tattoo, the owner might ask you to leave. The US they'll gulag your ass.

On the one hand, one of the things we often tout about the Old Internet was the ability for anyone to run their own website, forum, blog, etc, free from corporatization. On the other hand, running your website is a responsibility on your part, and in the convenience-focused Internet we have now, seems to be a forgotten lesson.

On the third, mutant hand growing out of our back, fedi software should be designed with security-by-default, i.e. no open registration, to prevent the forgotten lesson from being a huge problem.

In the wild, it's far more common for them to just spin up a bunch of accounts across "good" instances (particularly those without registration applications) and coordinate.

In 2023, this happened to a ton of unsecured Misskey instances who then proceeded to spam most of the Fediverse. It was just a troll in reality, but revealed that the Fediverse is no less vulnerable to coordinated, sophisticated attacks (and with how politically minded it is, there's plenty of incentive for nation state actors to do so).

Perhaps this may help: https://conslondra.esteri.it/en/servizi-consolari-e-visti/servizi-per-il-cittadino-straniero/cittadinanza/cittadinanza-per-discendenza/

Just wanna say warm wishes, share your research if you find anything.

Might be a great excuse to visit Denmark... I hear it's wonderful there.

The papers we hold up and say "this will be the foundation of our government, society, and economy" can say anything we want, but none of the words on the page matter once the people in the system abdicate their responsibilities to point at something wrong, refuse to participate, and work against it.

SOX controls are the result of the Enron fraud, but those are also just words on a page. The US Constitution is just words on a page. SCOTUS may very well rule this year that the US government cannot deport native-born, tax-paying, passport-holding, lived-here-all-their-lives US citizens.

Watch as the Trump administration does it anyway. It's all just words to them.

Well there's the disaster that was hexbear...

They also have 1.4 Billion people, each.

4x the US population.

The Baltics catching strays: "and I took that personally"

Yeah they were never learned to begin with.

Wow... That's quite the journey. Thank you for sharing it.

It's particularly enlightening is that the diversity of information presented to you is what helped you change. Not just one "gotcha" quote from some online commenter, one snippy remark about a noticeable hypocrisy. Not one source of disruption, but many. I think that's fascinating, and extremely helpful for those of us with family who only get their news and opinions and politics from one place.

Again, thanks for telling your story.