That was me in the middle of my depression. Still is sometimes on bad days.

Meanwhile, India has annexed Madagascar

Karma aka. Reputation is already a thing. It's not all that accurate because up-/downvotes from/in defederated instances aren't counted, but the information is out there for anyone who wants to know. See my 1st level reply to OP.

I'm sorry to tell you that an equivalent of Karma existed from the very beginning (though rather than being Upvotes minus Downvotes, it was Boosts minus Downvotes until a few days ago due to a bug). It's called Reputation and you can see it by viewing someone's profile in kbin. At the time of writing this, your Reputation points seem to be at 443. Reputation isn't being used for anything though, and while it can technically be tracked by anyone, lemmy hides that information so far.

[In fact, you can see who gave up- or downvotes to something and you can also see what someone up- or downvoted (or boosted, but that's a given, since boosting is equivalent to retweeting). This information is out there for anyone to access who spins up their own instance due to how federation works, so the developer of kbin decided to make it public so people are at least aware of this fact.]

I would claim actual free speech absolutists don't exist.

Musk is a proponent of near-absolute free speech

Anything goes, so long as it doesn't hurt his feelings personally

Does he? Is that even possible?

Easy. Kbin/lemmy admins actually listen to their users, unlike spez and his cronies. The asshole can move to their own instance and continue there, but that might get them defederated.

Writing a cookie and reading it back should work just fine even in incognito mode. It just gets deleted once incognito is closed.

That's a bad take. There are some users that regularly write outstanding content or even just a series of posts that you don't want to miss the next installment of. Examples on Reddit were /u/Gambatte in /r/TalesFromTechSupport and /u/SqwrlTail in /r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk

Ah yes guestbooks. My first foray into actual programming (rather than just HTML) was when I wanted to add a guestbook to my silly little website, followed a tutorial, found out tutorial was borked and went looking for advice on what was going wrong (multiple things). By the time my guestbook worked properly I knew PHP(4 or 5) reasonably well.

It isn't the case.

The first problem was actual trolls using were using lemmy.world's open and automated registration (beehaw makes you write why you want to join and manually approves registrations based on that) to troll Beehaw.

The second problem was that the moderation tools aren't mature enough yet to deal with problem one with anything between manually banning every troll (which will immediately come back by creating another lemmy.world account) and total defederation from the instances most of those trolls are coming from.

Because Beehaw's mission statement is to be a safe space, it was decided to go with the defederation option.

However, the defederation isn't planned to be permanent. Improvements in mod tools and/or maturing of communities are said to be reasons to refederate again.

Edit: spelling