And I think letting everyone decide for themselves how they run their instances and who they federate with is an important cornerstone of the fediverse. I’m more than fine with people not wanting to interact with threads. But what happens on my tiny instance with me as the only active user shouldn’t be cause for outrage.

I’ve once been downvoted to oblivion for not defederating threads.com before it even went online. Fediverse people are weird.

Just a regular Mastodon server with federation disabled might be a good start.

I don’t think so. French “tiens” is a form of the verb “tenir” (“hold”). German “tja” is pronounced almost exactly the same and is only used as an interjection with a similar meaning but doesn’t have any related forms that I could think of.

Especially the southern German dialects have quite a few words that originated as loan words from French so it’s at least plausible. Could of course just be a coincidence as well. Languages are full of those.

And this is the moment I realized that German “tja” (“well”) probably comes from French “tiens” even though I’ve had five years of French in school.