Given the crossover of people displaying "thin blue line" flags with those showing "thin red line" flags (which is stupid, who is against the fire department??), and with their success in harassing corporations into dropping DEI initiatives, I wouldn't put it past right-wing crazies to try bullying their fire departments into ignoring incidents for their progressive neighbors
This "just open the source code and change a few variables" github energy isn't good enough for a big boy platform.
Honest question, who is doing this? All android apps I've used have been completely fine and usable out of the box, and you can just go to your instance web address on your computer. Are you on some ancient alpha version of a client that hasn't been maintained?
I think it's easy to understand Mastodon, or any federated service, using a metaphor for a country or large place, where you can say "I want to move to X country" but then you have to actually pick a place IN that country to live, like a specific city or rural district. Once you decide on your instance, it's really not that hard
The problem is that they have been brainwashed by 30 years of right-wing media to convince them to never believe anything Democrats say ever. We could tell them literally everything they want to hear and they would say we're lying, or nod along and then go vote for the Republican anyway
Dems are not standing by, they just ran a whole goddamn election. That they were/are bad at that is not in question. You can be mad at them all you want for losing but don't act like they didn't try to warn us and do something about it
Given the crossover of people displaying "thin blue line" flags with those showing "thin red line" flags (which is stupid, who is against the fire department??), and with their success in harassing corporations into dropping DEI initiatives, I wouldn't put it past right-wing crazies to try bullying their fire departments into ignoring incidents for their progressive neighbors