A true champion of free speech. 🙄

Good question! Whether it’s actually infringement is a legal judgment I’m certainly not qualified to make. 🙂 But my understanding is that it hinges on whether a court thinks a “reasonable person” could be confused. For example, a clothing brand called “Firefoxy” would probably be in the clear since Mozilla isn’t in the clothing business. And maybe even a clothing brand named “Firefox” might be okay! For example, Apple Computer and Apple Records (founded by The Beatles) coexisted nicely for a long time until Apple Computer started getting into the music-selling business. I forget how it got resolved (maybe a licensing agreement?) but The Beatles’ music wasn’t available on the iTunes Music Store for a looooong time while that dispute was going on.

Firefish is an online service and software package, the very space Mozilla operates in, so there’s at least a case to be made that reasonable people might incorrectly assume it’s from Mozilla. It’s come up many times in this discussion already, and we as active Fediverse users are already pretty well informed about this!

The name is way too similar to the Firefox trademark and could create the impression that Firefish is associated with Mozilla. I suspect some lawyers are currently in a huddle trying to figure out how to send a Cease and Desist letter that won’t completely piss off the community.

(Trademark law, at least in the US where Mozilla is headquartered, requires organizations to actively defend their trademarks. So just ignoring Firefish would be risky, even if they don’t actually mind the similarity.)

Look for an instance that has adopted the Mastodon Server Covenant, points 3 and 4 deal with this situation. It’s just a promise, not a guarantee, but most people running such instances are doing it because they care deeply about their community.

What, you don’t think a self-professed “former therapist” is an expert on infectious disease and vaccine development??? 😂

I do have to agree that the medical and scientific community’s consensus shouldn’t be “beyond reproach”, but only because the scientific method requires being open to new evidence that shows past theories to be flawed. (Key word evidence.)

Alas, a common tactic for spreading misinformation can be summed up as “a mosquito doesn’t care if the window is only open by an inch or all the way, it’ll fly inside regardless.”

I used to think along similar lines, but later came to understand structural inequality. You see, we don’t all start on an even playing field. The children of wealthy adults have far more opportunity than children of working-class adults, for example. Children from families living in poverty may struggle to keep up with their peers in school if they aren’t getting adequate nutrition. (School lunch programs help, but don’t fully address the problem.) Our lineage and our luck play a large role in what we might think of as “merit”.

When it comes to racial equity programs for college admissions or the like, these programs exist because we acknowledge that people of colour — especially Black people — have been systematically oppressed for generations in ways that impact the following generations.

• Chattel slavery in the US wasn’t all that long ago, and when it finally ended, the former slaves didn’t receive any reparations — the slaveholders did, and Black people with no wealth and no land were essentially forced to work for what we’d call pennies in today’s money.
• The Jim Crow era is still part of living memory. The 1921 Tulsa race massacre was literally just a single lifetime ago and decimated one of the few communities were Black people had managed to accumulate wealth, killing an estimated 150 to 300 Black people and caused massive economic losses for the survivors, not to mention the immense trauma and the implicit threat it sent to similar communities.
• The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s is quite recent history, and there are still many people alive today who remember when Dr. King was assassinated while advocating and organizing for equal protection under the law.
• The War On Drugs was predominantly focused on Black communities in its 1980s heyday. Plenty of white people used the same drugs at the same time, but law enforcement disproportionately targeted people of colour. Aggressive policing of Black communities continues today, resulting in a lot of children with jailed parents.

Try to imagine being a Black child growing up today. You’re more likely to be in poverty and going hungry than your white peers, more likely to need to drop out of school to earn money, more likely to have a parent jailed, the list goes on, all while constantly getting subtle (and sometimes blatant) messages that you’re “inferior”.

You and I obviously didn’t create this situation, but the fact remains that we don’t all start life on equal footing. Yes, there are plenty of white people who grow up in poverty, have parents in jail, etc… but it’s not systematic for white people. Affirmative action in education is a way we can ensure more of the most talented Black minds can access the education and experiences they need to help break this repeating cycle and someday, hopefully, build a society without such immense barriers beginning from birth.

(edit: I’m Canadian now, but I grew up in the US so I’m much more informed about its history.)

Marginalized people would suffer far, far, far more than the bad actors. ☹️ Many people who have been doxxed already go through this, and it’s still near-impossible to stop an online harasser even if you have proof of who they are. It would become dangerous for us to be online at all if this “miracle” were to come about.

It seems like the author is asking “why isn’t there a just-like-Reddit or just-like-Twitter site that was totally ready and waiting for this moment, and even though we’d never heard of it before now has everyone using it?”

Fediverse is different, and that’s a good thing. Because note how all of these corporate social media platforms are ending up…

…nope, can’t use it to chat with my friends and family, we all gave up on Teh Goog and I worked there for over a decade! 😆

(also, by the time you see this, they may have renamed it or introduced a competing messaging app. or both.)

Sorry, I couldn’t read this all the way through. All I hear that author saying is various capitalist-mindset “if it won’t serve everyone and won’t ever become a monopoly that crushes competitors, it’s not worth doing” b.s.

It’s perfectly fine that the Fediverse isn’t the best option for everyone! Geeze!

Ooh ooh, let me make some popcorn before I read this!

That, and also just a preemptive caution from having seen similar discussions go that route in the past. As you implied, it’s virtually impossible to exist in the modern world without being findable and harassable, no matter how careful one is.

Also, I’ll just leave this here. 🙂

It’s creepy af, but let’s all be careful not to victim-blame please.

How long until Google gives up and shuts it down? Place yer bets!!!