I have increasingly been assuming the shitjustworks instance is all right wing lunatics and libertarianisms

Your #1 mistake is assuming that users on a decentralized social media instance are a monolith.

Don’t forget about Pale Moon and Basilisk.

This still doesn’t mean Google has some kind of ownership for it. Nobody stops you from forking it and taking it into a different direction.

ai shit is all easy to disable

Users don’t have to disable it. Just give them a browser where they’re not enabled by default!

Google tech

Chromium is open-source. It doesn’t belong to Google or anyone else.

There aren’t better alternatives

They are literally mentioned in the article:

Those unhappy have another option: use an AI‑free Firefox fork such as LibreWolf, Waterfox, or Zen Browser.

- https://manualdousuario.net/en/mozilla-firefox-window-ai/.

Yes. Chromium isn’t bad in itself though.

What do you mean by “we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good”? Why should I use a browser which is actively anti-user when there are better alternatives out there?

bold, italics, etc. are used to indicate context

How can you guarantee they are? There are no technical restrictions or instructions on how much or where you can use emphasis and strong emphasis in your message. Until that’s not the case, “italic” and “bold” should be treated as purely presentational markup.

used for accessibility purposes Screen readers do not and should not care about presentation; abusing semantic markup to indicate through emphasis that something is italic or bold is anti-accessibility.

Interesting fact: Firefox (or Gecko to be accurate, because there was no single “Firefox” browser back then - there was Netscape Navigator and Mozilla Application Suite) had such rendering mode, but it was quickly abandoned.[1]

1. https://hsivonen.fi/doctype/: “In the summer of 2000 before Netscape 6 was released, Gecko actually had parser modes that enforced HTML syntax rules and one of these modes was called the “Strict DTD”. These modes were incompatible with existing Web content and were abandoned.”