Bizarre! Any extensions installed which might block script loading? Try in a private window, and if that works, clearing cookies. I haven’t seen anyone on the GOG forums report anything like this, while at least half the people there use Firefox, so it should be fixable on your side somehow.
That tone-deaf non-apology was only on reddit, by a new-on-the-job “community specialist”. They did a (slightly) better apology an hour later on twitter and the GOG forum: https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2026/06/c1cdf9fda39aaa5532ee375b38abb04376c7505d.png
GOG works absolutely fine on Firefox for me. You might have some broken script stored in cache or somesuch. Try a hard reload (ctrl-shift-R).
10 years ago they intended to, then dropped it. Starting this year, they looked at it with renewed interest, hired a senior dev for it, and have actually been working on it.
The explanation which makes most sense to me - but which hasn’t been confirmed by GOG - is that the newsletter person did a web search for “slavic emojis”, for which the top hit is a horribly racist website masquerading as an emoji site, which lists all the used glyphs on the first line of the results. (There is no “Slavic” unicode block or anything similar, and the characters used are from Malaysian, Greek and Cameroon script blocks, so not something you’d easily assemble on your own, no matter what your intentions were.)
That site (or at least the users contributing its content) intended all the dog-whistling which was picked up on. However, with a default macOS font installed, the most objectionable “SS” (presented on that site as a single glyph) shows all curly and non-objectionable (5th ‘character’ in the screenshot). So with the newsletter person in a hurry and never scrolling down to the more obviously racist content (or using an AI-assisted interface?), the characters they saw didn’t trigger any alarms. As GOG is perpetually understaffed plus it was a long-weekend, QA was nearly non-existent and communication fumbled.
This was their final apology and communication about it: https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2026/06/c1cdf9fda39aaa5532ee375b38abb04376c7505d.png - so an apology about the newsletter, but nothing about the tone-deaf first followup from the new-on-the-job “community specialist” who was posting the heritage stuff on reddit and ineffectually trying to make sense of the rendering differences without any proper understanding of unicode characters and glyphs and thus muddying the waters further.
I agree with the general sentiment that this article doesn’t make its case well - but there certainly is a valid case about the risk of any single instance getting too big.
I think that as long as Mastodon GmbH are still the good guys, a more effective strategy than trying to get individual users to change their behaviour, might be to get Mastodon GmbH themselves to see and agree that mastodon.social being this big in not in the interest of the overall long-term health of the network - and to build in automatic size limiting, where any instance with more than x% of users will close signups until they drop well below that threshold.
They’ve made a lengthy post for what’s next
20 screens down this page, and barely over the halfway point with that - this made me chuckle. I think I have a thing or two to learn before I can aspire to “lengthy”. ;)
Michał Kiciński, the new owner, just posted a thorough apology: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/nazi_symbols_in_an_email_and_bs_excuse/post277
(If you’re on the default 20 posts per page view, you need to go back a page (to the bottom of page 18) to actually read post 277, as deleted posts in that thread means the linking to specific post numbers is broken.)