As long as you understand that your own opinion does not dictate how language ends up being used by others. Some NB people call themselves trans, others don’t. I hope you won’t go around implying that people who identify as both trans and non-binary are wrong identifying as such. That’s arguably gatekeeping, and could make some people very uncomfortable.

I think this sounds like we’re generally in agreement? I might just put less weight on “the canon”.

like what you mentioned with Xenia, the old Linux Mascot.

To be fair, trans Xenia was sanctioned by the original artist, but my worry was along the lines of, if cathodegaytube was a “strong believer” in the Prime Egg Directive, would it have discouraged them from re-imagining this character? I don’t personally think how recent a character was created or whether it was abandoned has any relevance.

I subscribe to the idea that art is up to the viewer to interpret how they want. “Death of the author” I think it’s called. If someone looks at Felix, and sees an egg in him that has yet to crack, then that’s a valid interpretation of the art, to that person. Just as if someone were to look at a character and interpret them as trans, whether they are canonically cis or it’s left open (Spider Gwen comes to mind). I experienced a sad ending to a story? Well, too bad, author, my headcanon’s now that everything works out after all!

There may be problematic ways of doing that, and it’s in no way okay to assert one’s interpretation as the only truth. But fundamentally, that’s part of the freedom you get with art.

Would Bridget have become canonically trans if that freedom was taken away from people? (And heck, does it include the author?) Would Xenia have been reborn as a popular now-trans Linux mascot?

So there’s gotta be wiggle room in both situations. Fictional characters breaking the Prime Egg Directive, because of artists’ freedom of expression; and real people seeing fictional characters differently from the author and others, because of freedom of interpretation.

For a more concrete example, this post: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/22944727

I found this comic really heckin’ funny. Then I checked the comments. “Egg Prime Directive” Was I… supposed to be in agreement that the comic is problematic? I can’t really, no matter how I tried to twist it in my head. (Props to the mod for leaving the post up even though they criticized it though.)

Of course, nobody should do this to a real person, but this is a representation of something the artist has felt. We see comics of characters being ridiculous, or doing the impossible, and stories that involve violence or all manner of bad things. You wouldn’t take this to mean that you can or should do that in real life, right?

People can rightfully inform others to tell them not to behave like that themselves. But I worry that if they’re too blunt (figuratively) shouting “Prime Egg Directive!”, there will be people that feel discouraged about expressing themselves artistically like this, or making light of their own past in certain ways. And again, I’ve legit felt anxious myself at times when this came up before, and even now when I’m trying to talk about it.

Which service? Mastodon has a built-in export functionality in preferences.

I can’t find such an option on Lemmy, but you should be able to do a GDPR request for your information as a last resort.

edit: Non-post data / user settings can be exported (and imported!) but posts are a separate issue. See this open issue.

There’s been a hostile takeover at Gitea and it’s now run / owned by a for-profit company. The developers forked the project under the name Forgejo and are continuing the work under a non-profit. See also: Their introduction post and a page comparing the two projects. Feel free to look up more, since I haven’t familiarized myself with the incident all that much myself. Either way though, maybe consider using Forgejo instead of Gitea.