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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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I am imagining reddit-style jannies

Then you lack imagination. There will presumably be some with much stricter mods.

But they'll end up splintering in a series of inevitable purity spirals as these things are wont to do.

Normies would probably end up on whichever one the most celebrities end up on (or their particular favorite if they have one).

This is actually an area where the purity spiral moves in your favor.

Splintering off into their own instance means that the normies can't really be exposed to the memes generated on that instance (they'd have to federate with an improperly pure instance to do that, if they were willing to do that, they probably wouldn't be in the purity spiral to begin with).

As opposed to a new faction splintering off on twitter, where they can get exposure to the entire normie audience.