That’s surprisingly accurate, as people here are highlighting (it makes geometrical sense when dealing with complex numbers).

My nephew once asked me this question. The way that I explained it was like this:

• the friend of my friend is my friend; (+1)*(+1) = (+1)
• the enemy of my friend is my enemy; (+1)*(-1) = (-1)
• the friend of my enemy is my enemy; (-1)*(+1) = (-1)
• the enemy of my enemy is my friend; (-1)*(-1) = (+1)

It’s a different analogy but it makes intuitive sense, even for kids. And it works nice as mnemonic too.

For the morons downvoting the post: STOP SHOOTING THE MESSENGER DAMMIT. Problems don’t go away if you hide them, OP is morally right on highlighting the issue.

In addition to what OP said: check the admin and creator of the instance, outright claiming to be a MAP. That’s just a paedophile under another name.

Hard to say. Like, do “Ivan”, “Giovanni” and “John” count as the same, or different names? What about Latin “Amanda” (to be loved) vs. Japanese 愛/Ai (love)? How do we even count this?

Even if this is a joke, this is a great example of something that happens all the time: people avoiding responsibility by blaming some chunk of software. The electronic equivalent of “No, sir! I didn’t kill that person. The butter knife did it!”

The devs have spoken about this. Quoting Nutomic:

Or you could just put a link to your old account into your bio. So this might be a useful feature, but very very low priority. // More useful could be import/export of settings and subscriptions (also much easier to implement).

So there are plans to address this in the future, so you don’t lose your data from server migration, but migrating the account itself is low priority. (Even then if someone found a way to do this, and submitted a pull request, they’d probably accept it.)