There’s !malefashionadvice@lemmy.world, which seems active

It would be doable, and libraries have been amenable to this sort of thing, like not handing over records about checking out books. This is even easier than checking out books, since you don’t actually need to record who is attached to the account. Libraries could obfuscate information that could lead to invasion of privacy. And because it’s distributed and local, it’s much harder to abuse. If someone tried creating 100 accounts, the librarians would start remembering them and refusing to give them more. Going around to 100 libraries would also be much harder than spamming a new account page on some website.

becomes easier to dox if you have the person’s location

Yeah, I guess “take over” is too strong vs “provide the option of”. It shouldn’t be the only way, but would be one very good option. They don’t need to actually keep any records of who they gave an account to, and can take steps to obfuscate any privacy-violating processes. Historically, they’ve been very amenable to this, such as not handing over records about who checked out books.

How many libraries

That’d be a great thing IMO. More skills like that should be distributed and federated. Libraries should be community centers of learning, including learning how to run servers. Information isn’t just books anymore, and libraries need to adapt.

It’d be nice to see public libraries take over this sort of thing. They can do community-based physical verification, without cost. They can assert that someone is legit, without revealing any private info. They’d have to be low-drama, boring infrastructure, in that they merely assert “This person is real”, without getting into “This person is good”.

It’s not sexy like a new protocol or blockchain or whatever, but IMO it’s one of the few ways to really handle the problem, and also is a good way to help build local community.

Reminds me of this short from a while back. It didn’t quite predict the focus on smaller, cheaper drones, but still pretty good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyMNIFZTQkg

This is also some good context about drones being the future of warfare, including in space. Star Wars having fighters duke it out with human pilots will almost certainly not be a thing:

https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fighter.php

The Godfather basically invented the modern idea of gangsters as sophisticated:

Gangsters reportedly responded enthusiastically to the film. Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, the former underboss in the Gambino crime family, said: “I left the movie stunned … I mean, I floated out of the theater. Maybe it was fiction, but for me, then, that was our life. It was incredible. I remember talking to a multitude of guys, made guys, who felt the same way.” According to Anthony Fiato, after seeing the film, Patriarca crime family members Paulie Intiso and Nicky Giso altered their speech patterns to imitate that of Vito Corleone. Intiso was known to swear frequently and use poor grammar, but after seeing the movie, he began to improve his speech and philosophize more. In 2025, The Times reported that recruits to the Sicilian Mafia in Italy are now urged by mafia bosses to watch The Godfather so they can learn the trade and because mafia bosses fear that new recruits “lack a code of honour”.

There’s a relevant bit in The Player of Games from The Culture series. It purports that the book you’re reading is actually translated from the original Marain (in-universe language), and has been adapted suitably:

Still with me?

Little textual note for you here (bear with me).

Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of personal pronouns, so I’d better explain that bit of the translation.

Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.

So, in what follows, Gurgeh is quite happily thinking about the Azadians just as he’d think about any other (see list above)… But what of you, O unlucky, possibly brutish, probably ephemeral and undoubtedly disadvantaged citizen of some unCultured society, especially those unfairly (and the Azadians would say under-) endowed with only the mean number of genders?!

How shall we refer to the triumvirate of Azadian sexes without resorting to funny-looking alien terms or gratingly awkward phrases not-words?

…. Rest at ease; I have chosen to use the natural and obvious pronouns for male and female, and to represent the intermediates - or apices - with whatever pronominal term best indicates their place in their society, relative to the existing sexual power-balance of yours. In other words, the precise translation depends on whether your own civilisation (for let us err on the side of terminological generosity) is male or female dominated.

(Those which can fairly claim to be neither will of course have their own suitable term.)

Anyway, enough of that.