Some people are questioning why there are gender-specific categories in chess.

That's a good question and my understanding is that there is only a female category and then the general one where both men and women can participate. The female one seems to have been created to encourage the participation of women due to the general one being monopolized by men.

You may agree or not with that reasoning and I am not trying to take any stance on it, just trying to answer the questions on why they created a gender-specific category in the first place.

I am not really into chess competitions and my understanding of this point is based on explanations I saw from others elsewhere, so I may be wrong.

I know crossposters make transition easier for people who find it hard to completely switch from Reddit to Lemmy, but we've been there already in Mastodon and crossposters were not very appreciated because they are basically bots. They allow you to continue using Reddit or Twitter as your main account while you mirror your content to Lemmy or Mastodon.
It's frustrating for people who actually use Lemmy or Mastodon to find some content they want to interact with and later notice it's from an unattended account that is just mirroring content from another site so your interactions won't get any reply because you are basically talking to a bot.

Github Copilot.

I know you are not suggesting that seriously, but if we were to consider that seriously, I don't think it would work.
Palestine (and more concretely Jerusalem) is considered the Holy Land by Judaism, Islam and Christianity. That's why the state of Israel was created there and not somewhere else. And that's why Palestinians wouldn't receive with a lot of enthusiasm the idea of being given a state of their own somewhere else.
A big part of the conflict is a "holy war" thing about who controls the Holy Land.

It works for me, so the issue must be on your side (or they fixed the link)

Some other already gave good possible explanations to this, but I am adding my own subjective uninformed view on this:

Not many people may actually like wearing crop tops but they do it for 'fashion' reasons and those fashion reasons so far dictated that women are the ones who have to wear them.

Me, as a man, haven't personally tried crop tops, but it feels to me like it would be uncomfortable. It feels actually uncomfortable to me when sometimes I wear an old t-shirt at home which has become shorter leaving some small lower parts of my back or abdomen uncovered. And it's not because of any social construct, I live alone and nobody can really care about what I wear, so it's not that. But it's like feeling cold on the lower back of my torso but warm in the upper part. It just feels uncomfortable.
That's just my personal feeling but I can imagine more people could feel the same.
So I can imagine wearing a crop top can give a similar uncomfortable feeling?

But sexualization of women required them to expose more parts of their body (most of their torso) while covering those ones not considered to be decent enough to be shown in public (breasts). But that sexualization and exposure of their bodies is something that is usually not so much required from men.

I think the original question asks why not so many mean wear crop tops as a choice they make, but I think it hasn't been so much a choice for women as it may have been a command from sexualizing fashion and the heteropatriarchy has determined that the uncomfortably and exposure of their bodies related to crop tops is something women have to wear not always because it's their choice but to comply with sexualized fashion standards.

I am not a woman or wear crop tops either, so I may be wrong on all this, I'm mostly just thinking out loud 😄

I like to see it that way, as an easy way to refer to everyone who doesn't fit within the cishet norm.
As others have mentioned, this used to be a derogatory term, so some people may still feel uncomfortable with it, but it has been reclaimed since then and I think nowadays we have long past the point where most people still see it as a derogatory word.
Also, it seems it annoys Graham Linehan, which is always a bonus: https://twitter.com/Glinner/status/1681657946529202182

If you look at the data, the main reason why people detransition is not because "transition wasn’t right" for them.

Turban et al. found in 2021 that among the people who have detransitioned, the vast majority of them (82.5 %) cited external factors for detransitioning such as pressure from parents (35.6 %), other family members (25.9 %), partners (20.2 %) or friends (14.2 %), societal stigma (32.5 %), difficulty to get a job as a trans person (26.9 %) or pressure from employers (17.5 %) as opposed to 15.9 % citing internal factors with only 1 % citing not being able to identify with the gender they had transitioned to, 2.4 % having doubts about their gender and 10.5 % citing having fluctuations about their gender.

And I would even say that only that 1 % could fit in that definition of people who detransitioned because "transition wasn't right for them", as having doubts or fluctuations about their gender can mean something else (like transitioning to something else like non-binary or gender-fluid).

So the vast majority of people who have detransitioned did it because of how hard it was made by transphobes to live their lives as trans people, not because the transition wasn't right for them.
It's kind of a self-fulfilled prophecy where transphobes make trans people's lives so hard that some of them are not able to bear with it anymore so they have to detransition and then transphobes say "see, they had to detransition because they regret having transitioned, hence transitioning is wrong".

It's the same kind of self-fulfilled prophecy as those LGBT+-phobic people who say they wouldn't want to have LGBT+ kids because they would be less happy, but the only ones trying to make LGBT+ people's lives miserable are those phobes themselves.

Probably unpopular opinion: I hope that happens sooner than later.

I always saw packaging every piece of software for every distribution as a lot of duplicate work that could be better used somewhere else.

As an example, Gentoo's default repository has ~18k packages (not to mention the many other packages in additional repositories), each one of them with its own building script, maintainers and tests.
Most of those packages are also present in other Linux distributions, again with their own maintainers, different building scripts and having passed their own tests.

Doesn't that sound like a lot of duplicated work for each distribution that could be used instead on improving the core system and pushing the burden of packaging applications upstream as flatpaks?

Also, since flatpak packages dependencies with the application, they could fix the dependency hell problem in a big part because the developer will determine what dependencies your package runs with, instead of relying on whatever version of the dependencies may be installed in your system.

And it could also solve the quick death of Linux applications. I'm sure most of you saw how quickly applications get unusable in Linux. You find an application you like, but because it was developed for an older version of some library (like OpenAL or GTK+2) you cannot use it anymore.
Have you seen that in Windows? You can still use most of the applications developed for Windows XP in Windows 10.

That of course has its drawbacks. Because you are packaging dependencies with the application, you will have duplicates of the same library for each application, but I think that's a fair price to pay for more stable and durable applications. That's very similar to what Windows applications do.

I'm talking about flatpak. Like most of the people here, my experiences with snap were bad, I am not interested in it and I think it's Cannonical going their own way.

It seems that before Instagram's Threads was launched, threads.net was just a domain name parked for sale with GoDaddy's domain auction service Afternic: https://web.archive.org/web/20221115220239/http://threads.net/

So I guess Meta just paid whatever they were asking to be paid?

The Spanish translation doesn't make sense, seems to be made using the worst automated translator.

LGBTQ+ and labour laws are very different across countries, so it's very difficult to talk generally about how this works without being specific to some country.

I will talk about Spain because there's where I am from and where I worked most of the time.
You generally just cannot fire someone for arbitrary reasons before their contract comes to an end. You really have to justify why you need to fire that person, like having several poor performance reviews against them. Otherwise, you may risk having your firing judged as "unjustified" and having to pay that person a big compensation or even the firing being judged as void and having to readmit them to the position you fired them from.
No matter whether they are cis, gay, straight, man, woman, POC or whatever, you just cannot fire someone without a valid reason unless their contract has come to an end and you don't renew it, that's basically it.

So could someone argue that your sexual orientation or gender identity is a valid reason to fire you because being gay doesn't fit within their company culture or having trans people may cause them an image problem?

No, article 4.2.c of the Worker's Statute says you cannot be discrimanted for employment based on sexual orientation or gender identity, among other criteria like ethnicity, age, union membership, etc.
So you couldn't be fired for being either gay or straight, man or woman, cis or trans, etc. Nothing of that is a valid reason to be fired.

I created my account in Status.net (now GNU Social) around 2009 and later it was switched to pump.io: https://identi.ca/chuso
And Diaspora* in 2010: https://joindiaspora.com/people/4d0aa88b2c174330380001db
Like others, with not a lot success with those early projects until I joined Mastodon in 2017: @chuso

That reminds me this movie which tells the story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3169706/

What about hidden karma?
Like there is still karma used internally to decide what posts to promote and how to weight votes, but the numbers are kept only internally so people don't get obsessed with that number next to their (and others') profile?

Yes, there are red flags there IMHO.

You know, I've seen similar behaviours so many times from people that they tell you how many problems they have and they kind of put the burden on you to deal with their problems. I don't mean you cannot be supportive of them if they really have problems they are trying to fix, but you shouldn't be dealing with someone else's problems if they don't want to do anything about them themselves.

I usually listen to them, tell them that I understand they are going through hard times and that I understand how tough that is being for them and all that supportive stuff... and then I tell them to go to therapy.

We cannot be someone else's therapists. Unless, you know, we are actual therapists. And even in that case, they would have to go through one of our formal therapies. I don't think even therapists get into relationships with someone just to fix them.

Some people will take the advice and consider getting help while others will not even consider it because they just want to take you hostage of their emotions. It's not worth putting any much more effort into someone who is apparently crying for help but doesn't really want to make any change and just wants to manipulate you instead.

And punching other people? Yeah, I don't care how "honourable" his reasons were, that's also a red flag.

Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.

Well, that hasn't been my experience so far, and they are not even federating yet :-D

I have seen some data on that matter for the trans case because it's something I investigated recently to rebut the transphobic propaganda in Spanish right-wing media when a pro-trans law was recently approved. But you can also find similar studies for other members of the LGBTQIA+ group in Google Scholar.
There are four times more mental health issues like depression and suicidal ideation among trans people (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2016.06.012) and twice more suicidal attempts (https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2019-1183) because of what they have to go through than cis people.

fedi-block-api already existed and works with any fediverse instance, not only Lemmy.

Another Spaniard here, for the record.

I wouldn't say it's like Palestine, there are relevant differences between both cases. The basis of the Palestinian conflict and the reason why two states were created were mostly religious and ethnic. I don't think any of that plays a significant role in the Saharan case and it's all down to Moroccan expansionism and access to oil reserves in the Saharan sea.
In the Palestinian case, it was a former British colony that was being decolonized and tensions between two communities living in that territory led to the current situation. I'm not going into the details because it would be too long, you can just go to Wikipedia.
In the Saharan case, it was a Spanish former colony which, in the process of being decolonized, was invaded by a neighbouring country for political and economic reasons.

You are basically saying Western Sahara ended up in this situation because Spain abandoned it unattending the UN's mandate to decolonize it.
Spain was indeed attending the UN's mandate to decolonize it as it did with Equatorial Guinea a few years before, which is an independent country nowadays. But both Mauritania and Morocco had aspirations on Western Sahara and wouldn't accept an independent Sahara, so taking advantage of one moment of political weakness in Spain with the dictator retired to die, Morocco invaded Western Sahara and mainland Spain was more concerned about their internal issues and was not in the position to defend the Sahara against Moroccan invasion.

Mauritania eventually gave up on their aspirations on Sahara and that's how we ended up in the current situation with a Morocco-occupied Sahara with a self-proclaimed government that fights back against the occupation with very little support (other than Algeria) because Morocco has much stronger diplomatic ties.

The current situation, de jure, is that Western Sahara is a Spanish former colony in the process of being decolonized.
But de facto, it's a territory governed by Morocco and disputed with the Polisario Front, which was already fighting against Spanish occupation before Moroccan one and has declared an independent Republic which has very little recognition.
De jure, Spain would be continuing the decolonization process, but that's not realistic when the territory has been occupied by Morocco for half a century.

It's true, however, that this is not an issue that raises a lot of interest currently in Spain for anything else than playing internal politics.
Also, Morocco and Spain have a lot of common interests so Spain is very careful to not upset Morocco with this topic. On the other hand, Algeria is the biggest supporter of the Polisarian cause and another Spanish strategic ally and probably the reason why Spain hasn't fully abandoned yet the Saharan cause. So Spain usually tries to play a low profile on this trying to balance their position between not upsetting Morocco and not upsetting Algeria.

For more details, Wikipedia is still your friend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green\_March

And the former Spanish king being a CIA agent? Yeah, I don't think it's even worth to add any comment to that.

And, of course, when I say "Spain", "Morocco", "Algeria", etc., I am referring to the regime that ruled the country at that moment.
I'm not trying to imply that every Moroccan or Algerian is responsible for what their rulers do the same way that a lot of Spaniards were not Franco supporters by that time.

Hi, I saw the language selector and I wonder how that works, because I don't see anywhere where you can filter by language.
Are there any plans to allow filtering content by language like others (e.g., Mastodon) do? That would be really useful so I can choose to see content only in languages I understand. Or does something like that already exist but I haven't found it?

It's interesting that you say that while using a French word like "cliché". Maybe it was intentional from you? :-D
And maybe reducing not having a strong French influence to not having a wine/bread/cheese culture is, you know, reductionist?

That's what I initially read too and I was like "omg, what happened" 😆

I have no idea how it works under the hood, but I guess there is some caching given how fast results are retrieved.

This appears to be related to kiwi farms?

It was originally developed by Kiwi Farms when they were running their own Mastodon instance.
They built this tool because they were being massively defederated (for obvious reasons) but eventually gave up and closed their Mastodon instance.
Since then, other instances apparently not related to Kiwi Farms (but usually still that kind of "free speech" ones) have reinstantiated the service.

It also has a slur immediately on the page you linked

Oh, yes, I haven't seen that.

I think the same every time there is criticism of "pinkwashing" and "rainbow capitalism".
Yeah, some may be doing it just for profit and as a PR stunt, but it still matters.
I remember pride parades in London and Brighton were full of corporate floats like those from Deliveroo, Starbucks and National Rail.
Did they do it just for promotion? OK, maybe. But it still sends the message. A message that says that when you go into a National Rail train or a Starbucks café you can feel safe. And a message that other companies can also join and show that support without fearing that may damage their business with them.
Unfortunately, those messages are still needed today, so I don't really care very much if they do it for marketing as long as it still works for the cause.
If you are going to a bar and see they have tuned their logo to show the pride colors during June, they may be doing it for marketing, but at least you will know you can come in and feel safe there.
I even saw a float from the Premier League in Brighton and we know how much work is still needed there.

I 100 % understand that it's not easy and you may be scared of making that step even with supporting parents.
But we tend to imagine the outcome will be much worse than what it will probably be. And of course I don't know your situation and maybe your fear of a bad outcome is fully justified.
If you are sure your parents are transphobic and you still depend on them, maybe you will have to assess when it's a safe moment for you to make that move.
I think the best thing you can do is to seek help from an affirmative psychologist to help you assimilate that no one should give up living their own lives for the fear of upsetting or disappointing others and help you find the best moment to safely start asserting your identity. If that's not an option for you because seeking that kind of help would still need to go through your parents, you can search for local or online LGBT support groups.

Then wait until you find that you can follow Lemmy/kbin communities from Mastodon and comment on Lemmy/kbin posts from your Mastodon account 🤭