• @[email protected]
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    2151 month ago

    I just hope federal services (like applying for a passport) don’t become Twitter-only after Trump appoints Elon as Secretary of Enshittification.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 month ago

      [Deleted]

      I’ve made a huge mistake breaking my personal rule to avoid all political content and I’ve regretted that immediately

      • @[email protected]
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        1111 month ago

        Thing is, mate…fascists rarely stay inside their boarders. This is going to be the whole world’s problem in about 3 months.

          • SkaveRat
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            361 month ago

            upside: maybe fashism will kill us all before climate does? yay?

            • Gormadt
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              321 month ago

              With the fascist in power they’re going to speed up the climate destruction

              So maybe the fascist will kill us with the climate

              yay?

            • @[email protected]
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              31 month ago

              I’d rather eat rats and survive inside a hole in the ground in 45⁰C weather than die in a war, but that’s just me.

              • Gormadt
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                11 month ago

                NGL dying due to climate is definitely preferable to dying due to fascist hunting people like me

        • @[email protected]
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          1 month ago

          Trump wants adulation, not conquest. Push come to shove you can get him out of the oval office by making him figurehead Emperor, as long as it comes with immunity he’ll accept.

          On a scale of Mussolini to Hitler, he’s like 250% towards Mussolini.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 month ago

          international us policy is very similar between republicans and democrats. you guys are already the whole worlds problem. 🌍🧑‍🚀🔫🧑‍🚀

          im sorry but trump will be your problem. until the empire decides to turn up the violence dial again that is, which is something both parties do sometimes.

      • @[email protected]
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        311 month ago

        4 years if laws and constitution stay the same and are followed… first term he had people alienated into him who were at least slightly appropriated for their positions, this time people who has nothing to do with their positions are being appointed simply for being loyal to him… Let’s see if any of them won’t let him do anything drastic within 4 YEARS

      • @[email protected]
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        101 month ago

        Nah, most people are going to live their lives and see absolutely no effect from anything done. No single administration has the ability to totally fuck up the country in the amount of time they have. That’s why you get the big swings back and forth between the two parties. Also, the news is very good at sensationalizing absolutely everything and making you think that, oh my god, it’s the end of the fucking world. What are we going to do? Run around like chickens screaming with our heads cut off and shit.

        • @[email protected]
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          611 month ago

          We know that Ukraine will be betrayed by the Trump government. A Russian victory will embolden Russia to further threaten Europe. This will also embolden China and other authoritarian states.

          We also know a Trump government will stop climate action. Unfortunately, this will also signal to many other governments that they can do the same.

          We also know that immense cruelties will be perpetrated such as the family separation policy of the 1st Trump presidency

          But yes, if you are white, straight and middle class or rich, you’ll be able to think all is OK until such time as the authoritarian ascendancy led by China and Russia affects your own life, which might be a decade or more away.

          • @[email protected]
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            11 month ago

            How many people do you think would be affected by his deportation policies? I’ve heard a number of around 10 million, and that’s 3% of the population, which, while absolutely terrible, means that the other 97% isn’t going to really care.

            • @[email protected]
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              1 month ago

              Those 3% (going by your math):

              Pick crops

              Contribute $90 billion or more in tax for the county via sales tax.

              Without those people, we have no food, and immediate inflation begins. You know, the thing everyone was bitching about that was literally caused by Trumps inaction on COVID.

              This affects EVERYONE in the US.

              • Billiam
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                281 month ago

                Not to mention that the construction industry- particularly housing- just stops.

                • @[email protected]
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                  61 month ago

                  I did just get a roof put on my house. Small, local business. All the office people were white, the work crew was 100% Hispanic with one bilingual guy who front manned communication. Idk how many were work visa, but given the number of serious injuries I’ve seen from work visas falling off roofs while doing construction and such while at work, it’s not just one company.

                  And before you go down the path of “they’re taking ‘our’ jobs” remember that there is a shortage of skilled labor and trades right now.

                  Also, if a company can pay at or near minimum wage for rappelling up the side of house, would you accept that wage given the liability/injury threat?

                  Housing prices go up in reaction to losing cheap labor, I guarantee it.

            • Jo Miran
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              181 month ago

              “Stimpy, sometimes your wealth of ignorance astounds me.” – Ren Höek

            • @[email protected]
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              171 month ago

              I know the last time he was in office his immigration policies made it impossible for some people families to come over. I worked with a couple people struggling with that.

            • @[email protected]
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              81 month ago

              Food prices will go up, not down. I think everyone cares about food prices right now.

              I’m not just talking about outdoor crop picking work. A friend was laid off from a food production company this week and Trumps not even sworn in yet. You can’t make this stuff up it’s so ridiculous. So, anticipate job losses for non immigrants as well.

              2/3 of the factory line is Hispanic, and the majority of that is rotating work visa people. In this way, you can pay much lower wages.

              Part of it was tariff threat, no one would place orders, everyone’s on hold on the production/supply/buyer chain, waiting for January, so the income of the business dropped to zero this week and is projected to stay there through January. Again, this is food production, not bread or flour, or anything basic like that, but it’s still food.

              So, with no income and the threat of loss of cheap production labor, all the American citizens were laid off this week. Whether or not the business will eventually declare bankruptcy is undecided, but that talk is definitely on the table.

        • Jo Miran
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          351 month ago

          No single administration has the ability to totally fuck up the country in the amount of time they have.

          Women in need of reproductive health services in red states would like a word.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 month ago

          [Deleted]

          I’ve made a huge mistake breaking my personal rule to avoid all political content and I’ve regretted that immediately

          • Billiam
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            251 month ago

            Trump was already elected before and quickly became irrelevant after his 4 years.

            And who is going to be the next US President?

            And who is nominating a Russian asset to be DNI?

            And who is nominating a child sex trafficker to be AG?

            • @[email protected]
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              51 month ago

              And who is likely to nominate an antivax, anti-science lunatic with brain worms to head the dept of Health and Human Services?

              And who is planning to eliminate the department of education and NOAA?

              Previous administrations have done damage through incompetence and/or malice, but the plan this time is on another level. They’re going in with the goal of breaking everything.

          • @[email protected]
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            1 month ago

            Dobbs and Chevron would disagree with your claim of “irrelevant”. You might not be aware, but that’s not the same thing…

      • @[email protected]
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        It’s more than 4 years. We just crawled out of Trump inflation and now are going right back in.

        Dismantling and breaking is easy. They can do a lot of that in 4 yrs. Building takes decades.

        There’s also a global effect. Would Putin have ever attacked Ukraine without a Trump term? How about Israel’s taking self defense into genocide territory?

        America leads by example and the last example was an impulsive 3 yo with a giant military force and a dead diplomacy department in the executive branch. There’s permissiveness in that.

    • @[email protected]
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      401 month ago

      You mean head of DOGE? Because we live in the timeline where a terminally online edgelord with the brain of a 14yo and the body of a 54yo makes meme government agencies.

      Anyway, get your passport now. They’re good for ten years, enough to last at least through the tentative end of Trump’s circus.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 month ago

      Bsky federates. I follow several people from my Mastodon profile.

      Edit: I should add a caveat here. Federation doesn’t work as smoothly as Threads yet. You have to use a bridge service: https://fed.brid.gy/

      • db0
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        491 month ago

        For now. They’re still in their growth phase. If they ever become dominant and they need to make money, they’ll turn into a walled garden like every other. Everyone seems to forget that Twitter, Reddit and Facebook were also all about openness at the start

        • @[email protected]
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          221 month ago

          Absolutely, I don’t trust them at all. There’s a reason I’m on Mastodon and not either of the corporate platforms. It is nice to at least be able to follow people there though, and interact with them.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 month ago

          At a fundamental level the intended meaning of “federate” is that disparate communities and softwares can “connect” seamlessly, a bridge by definition is a tool used to connect things that are not connected or seamless.

          A federated landscape of interconnected trails is the structural antithesis to a landscape of bridges each laboriously muscled out of the headache inducing process of connecting two disparate systems with a third system specific to that bridge and that bridge only that must be endlessly revised and rebuilt to keep everything from collapsing in a heap.

          A bridge, by definition, is a composite of parts that are existentially vital to the sucessful conveyance of what passes over them, it only takes one section failing to break the entire bridge and it only takes one troll to block everything. A bridge, again by its very definition, is the most brittle architecture as every bridge is ultimately only a temporarily open door that must be continously be maintained and eventually rebuilt at the expense of great effort.

      • @[email protected]
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        61 month ago

        Oh, well that’s good anyway. Is it true that they only have like one major server? Because I’ve heard that, but I haven’t looked much into them, so I’m not sure if it’s still the case or not. To my understanding, they are meant to be a federated network, but really only have the one server.

        • Nate Cox
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          81 month ago

          Yeah this is still true as far as I know. Honestly this is probably what allowed BS to gain a foothold; I like mastodon too but asking new users to pick a server was always going to be a source of adoption friction.

        • @[email protected]
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          41 month ago

          Of course it is, why would people throw millions at investing in a product and then decentralize it to the point that there weren’t any bottlenecks to apply pressure and extract a profit back out of it? It makes no sense and would be a ridiculous business strategy.

          What is a good business strategy is associating your product with visions of decentralization while never truly intending to get there in practice.

          • @[email protected]
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            31 month ago

            Fair point. They will just grow their user base and then go all walled garden just like all the rest of the platforms. Protocols not platforms.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 month ago

          AFAIK that’s still the case, yes. I don’t have a Bluesky (or Threads) account so I can’t confirm.

      • @[email protected]
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        Not only federates but can also be partially self-hosted and is also open-source - by the way, I don’t mean it’s perfect but a lot better to reach people from there than Twitter, but be wary of this), anyone knowledgeable of US politics will know the names mentioned and how shady it looks. I still think Mastodon isn’t ready for this kins of exodus. People who waited this long to leave either wants convenience or is waiting for some of the people they follow go elsewhere, or both. Mastodon has too many mobile apps options, BlueSky official app is so much closer to how Twitter looks like and people are used to and don’t need to choosee instance as it already comes pre-selected by default (although people can change). Then comes the issue of scability if there was an instance to be the “default” for these people who just want quick and convenient alternative, will it be able to handle this much people at once? I have no idea but I doubt it. Most of us who go find alternative in the Fediverse is aware privacy-focused alternatives usually more than often comes at the price of convenience, not really the mindset those people are in, hopefully some of them get into it by learning what decentralization is from BlueSky?

    • @[email protected]
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      191 month ago

      Has an aggressively unpleasant user base and nowhere near the blocking functionality that Bluesky has, which is essentially mandatory now for minorities on the internet. Not to mention an onboarding process that can confuse the tech literate, much less the average person.

      This comment is not an invitation to talk about how actually it’s very simple and intuitive if you follow a 20 step process that relies on detailed knowledge of how federation works.

      • @[email protected]
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        61 month ago

        Those people will either learn one day or they will end up in the same vicious cycle over and over again for the rest of their lives until they do learn the lesson or die. The only reason the blue sky process is better is because, at least currently, they only have the one server. If it ever actually federates, like it’s supposed to, then that point is completely moot. Because then they won’t know how to sign up for blue sky either.

        • @[email protected]
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          221 month ago

          Oh no, not the same thing I’ve been doing since the mid 90s! I might die if I migrate sites again! Or something.

          Making a social network only usable by around 5% of the population and then complaining when only 5% of the population shows up is a pretty indicative attitude of why so many FOSS projects struggle to get widespread adoption. You don’t get to choose how tech literate the population is. You either make it more useable or you accept a limited audience.

        • @[email protected]
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          71 month ago

          Clown take. “People should just get smart!”

          95% of all American adults cannot use search functions in email.

      • @[email protected]
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        51 month ago

        I think it’s easy to understand Mastodon, or any federated service, using a metaphor for a country or large place, where you can say “I want to move to X country” but then you have to actually pick a place IN that country to live, like a specific city or rural district. Once you decide on your instance, it’s really not that hard

        • @[email protected]
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          11 month ago

          As a progressive worldly usa person which instance should I choose?

          Can or should it be tied to my lemmy.world instance somehow?

          Thx

          • @[email protected]
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            Some recommendations for lefty mastodon instances, all are vaguely tech themed, but that comes with the territory. That being said none of these instances feel like weird places to not be a techy person, the conversations and interactions on these instances occupy as diverse a range as anywhere else.

            https://mas.to/about

            https://elekk.xyz/about

            https://tech.lgbt/about

            https://eldritch.cafe/about

            https://digipres.club/about

            https://toad.social/about

            https://hellsite.site/about

            Your lemmy instance lemmy.world is under the umbrella of https://fedihosting.foundation/ which oversees both lemmy.world and the mastodon instance mastodon.world

            Can or should it be tied to my lemmy.world instance somehow?

            Please do whatever helps you express your identity/identities of your self best! You can always link between accounts in the public account bios.

            I will offer you a suggestion though, if you already made the account [email protected] why not make [email protected], link between them and perhaps indicate if you use one or the other account more. You might as well, people will still recognize you immediately on your mastodon account but you might find it nice to be able to interact with the fediverse through the perspective of mastodon/microblogging.

            Then make another account on a different mastodon instance that looks cool too, go wild, do whatever fits your fancy, the consequences to making an account and never using it are small enough that except in edge cases (you took up a slot on a server with a limited number of registrations or something) nobody is going to care!

            p.s. Notice all of these mastodon instances have thoughtful moderation policies that place an emphasis on protecting and centering vulnerable voices over valuing the “right” of socio-economically advantaged groups to spread hate speech in public. All these instances have links to the mastodon accounts of the humans who moderate those instances so you can get an idea of the human element of the moderation. How cool is that? Each place has its own slight spin on being a healthy community and you can find the place that is perfect for you!

      • muppeth
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        41 month ago

        You dont need to explain email so federation does not seem to be the issue here IMO. The problem is money which FLOSS projects usually don’t have. The successful ones have perhaps enough so that the devs can put food on their table, but not much else. Most of the apps are after Dayjob hobby projects. It’s hard to compete with those who have teams of paid staff.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 month ago

        Don’t forget the disproportionate control individual mods have over the network due to the shared defederation lists. I was on a general purpose instance which found itself defederated from a large part of the network because a mastodon.art admin had disagreement with a mod on the one I was on.

        • @[email protected]
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          31 month ago

          Putting aside control and anecdotes, neither of which would be fair to comment on without more context and a lengthier discussion, this breaks the email metaphor a bit, doesn’t it?

          The Fediverse is just like email, where we all talk to each other, except Outlook blocked Gmail because MS and Google had a fight during a meeting so you’re gonna have to migrate to Yahoo or learn to self-host.

          That’s not necessarily a criticism, I just find it funny.

  • Juice
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    811 month ago

    Bummer that isn’t mastodon but any inconvenience to musk is appreciated

    • @[email protected]
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      591 month ago

      Actually not a bummer in my opinion, let people sort into different platforms based on their interests like we used to do with forums.

      A fragmented internet is a better internet

      • @[email protected]
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        231 month ago

        But it’s not fragmented. Mastodon is still the odd “vegan” option while BlueSky is becoming the main Twitterlike platform. Mastodon is still coming out the other end mostly the same.

      • Cethin
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        121 month ago

        I somewhat agree, but it’s not going to happen. If Bluesky wins this battle, they’re just going to be the dominant platform. It’s not going to spread out. It’s just going to migrate. A federated alternative would at least be spread out by design, though connected still.

      • @[email protected]
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        that’s not how the modern internet works and unfortunately i am forced to be on facebook because all 4 of my hobbies no longer exists outside of it.

        if people moved to the fediverse instead of bluesky or such, then we’d actually be able to have a fragmented internet again - due to how the fediverse interconnects through federation.

        which i think is the best selling point the fediverse have - no longer would users need to be on multiple services, they could just be on one, and still interact with the services across the fediverse. but unless there is a mass-migration of one single service to the fediverse, such as people choosing mastodon over bluesky, to be the dominant service - it’s just never going to happen.

      • @[email protected]
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        41 month ago

        A fragmented internet is a better internet

        I’m going to quote that at every opportunity.

    • Encrypt-Keeper
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      441 month ago

      I say this as someone who likes fediverse microblogging (Mastodon, MissKey, etc) it will never be Mastodon. Mastodon and its maintainers are staunchly against all the things that would make it a viable replacement to Twitter.

        • @[email protected]
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          191 month ago

          They don’t like algorithms. They want you to select which content you see.

          That’s all I’ve got. Mastodon is a better, more open tech. And it’s pretty easy to get set up, relatively. It’s insane that companies haven’t jumped on it.

          You don’t even have to quit Twitter. You can just post to more than one place and give people the option.

          • @[email protected]
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            This is what happens when someone can’t put themselves into their user’s shoes and then wonder why a product isn’t doing as well as it is.

            They proclaim the product is great, it’s everyone else that’s the problem

        • @[email protected]
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          111 month ago

          Mastodon is, like, fine, but it has one gaping flaw that makes it utterly unusable for me.

          Basically, the issue is you cannot be assured that any particular instance contains the entire conversation thread/replies, because they’re not necessarily sent to every server participating in the conversation.

          Bluesky fixes that by the ‘firehose’ feeds federating out to the PDSes and providing complete reply chains, which just flat out makes it a better experience since you can actually see what everyone is saying, not just what people on servers you might be following already are saying.

          It’s a giant stupid flaw in Mastodon (since other AP based platforms such as, for example, Lemmy don’t have it) and really should be addressed since it makes the platform darn near useless since why am I following people to only get half of what might be a useful thread?

          • @[email protected]
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            that sounds crazy. that makes the idea of federation pointless imo… thank you for the response

            • @[email protected]
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              61 month ago

              Yeah, it makes federation, especially if you run your own server and don’t have a large user base, largely broken.

              You’ll end up getting a shockingly small amount of replies to people you follow’s posts, which (for me) is the whole reason I’m here.

              It almost forces you onto a larger server if you want a reasonable experience (or you have to start ingesting huge amounts of data via relays), but I mean, at that point why not just use bluesky instead?

  • @[email protected]
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    Why people cannot see that the core problem of twitter is not that it got bought by the asshole billionaire. It’s that the asshole billionaire was able to buy it.

    • @[email protected]
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      211 month ago

      Wasn’t he forced to do so after trying to back out, or am I either imagining that or thinking of someone else?

      • @[email protected]
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        241 month ago

        If I recall correctly he could have backed out but he would have had to pay I think 1billion as a penalty and worse admit things didnt go his way

        • @[email protected]
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          161 month ago

          300 Billion dollar portfolio, 34 Billion dollar loss (~22 Billion after he writes it off in “taxes”) and he has his own right-wing media company chocked full of nutters.

          I don’t think he cares much about the individual Billions much these days. Half his Tesla stock is securing his debt.

      • @[email protected]
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        It’s a little more complex than that. He, like, was buying shares, blew past the 5% ownership disclosure point, failed to disclose, was forced to disclose his stake. He was then offered a seat on the board, didn’t like the lack of control, and made a meme offer on the remaining stake to take the company private, tried to pull out, and was forced to buy the company he didn’t want to buy by the board of directors who didn’t want him to buy it.

        He’s the recent Adam Conover interview with the details: https://youtu.be/sxG2Y3E0uEY?si=r0VMY7s3iZ9uaP39

      • @[email protected]
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        61 month ago

        He also bought 9% of it and didn’t disclose it, IIRC that had something to do with it as well.

  • @[email protected]
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    591 month ago

    Let’s replace one proprietary service with another. It looks so good with its API wide open, like it’s never getting enshittified.

    • @[email protected]
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      231 month ago

      It’s obvious to me that we need to have laws to enforce portability of data and interoperability for large platforms.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 month ago

          I mean, this is one of the central pitches behind Web3.0/Crypto. Everything has a digital tag and its all going to be portable between platforms.

          Did it come to fruition? No, of course not. Its all a pile of scams. But then so was Web2.0 and Web1.0 during their heydays.

            • @[email protected]
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              21 month ago

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

              This goes all the way back to '98, when the original slew of start-ups gobbled up investments only to flop a few years later. Web2.0 had its own bubble burst starting in 2008, taking down a host of the early social media ecosystems (MySpace, Yahoo, and Geocities, most famously). Huge upfront investments with the promise of explosive ROI that took far longer to materialize (or simply never did).

              A great deal of the valuation in these firms was built on lies and bullshit - misreported user activity, overly optimistic monetization estimates, and outright accounting fraud.

              2020 gave us what looked like was going to be a third Crypto bust wave (FTX being the big industry leader leading the charge). But the pivot to AI appears to have bailed a lot of the bigger investors out. We’ll see how long that lasts.

              • @[email protected]
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                21 month ago

                Oh, I think I understand your point, but we do have different definitions of what a scam is.

                For me, if the guys getting fucked are capitalists or huge investing firms that were trying to leverage their money to make more money just from speculation and not being actually involved, that’s not a scam, that justice. Economic bubbles happen because big money guys are trying to gamble the system to start with, so karma.

                In the other hand, crypto scams are more close to a conman selling snake oil to the uneducated masses, that for me is a full fledged scam.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 month ago

          Yeah…the new Dumbass Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will be right on that. Top priority…I’m sure…

    • Communist
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      31 month ago

      Bluesky is not proprietary, it’s mit licensed and open source

    • @[email protected]
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      141 month ago

      There was a good explanation about why not mastodon the other day. It basically boils down to Bluesky is just an easier transition.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 month ago

        Yeah, that’s what I heard from my microblogging colleagues too. They tried Mastodon during the first wave of Twitter exodus, found it too frustrating/difficult, tried Bluesky and stuck with it ever since.

    • @[email protected]
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      121 month ago

      Mastodon is more of a protocol than a single service. It succeeds/fails on those terms, in the same way the old Web1.0 protocols did. Which is to say, you can’t enshitify a thousand micro-sites at once like you can enshittify one big site that’s under central control. But you also can’t do things like navigate, search, and socialize efficiently.

      Mastodon is successful in large part because it isn’t. When you let a single cartel of corporate psychos run a Mastodon account like they would a Twitter or Facebook, you end up with Truth Social (literally just a Mastodon branch instance).

      • @[email protected]
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        51 month ago

        That’s an interesting perspective. Do you think the same about lemmy? While also decentralized using the sameprotocol, it seems reasonably efficient to me. I’m from a small instance from my country, and the global content is easily available to me.

        I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy… this is what I consider the main issue withthe fediverse as a whole.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 month ago

          Do you think the same about lemmy?

          I think it depends on how the federated sites are administered going forward. We’ve already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem. And I could see a future in which one of the larger instances - a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.

          I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy…

          I’m reasonably tech savvy and even I’d struggle to tell you exactly how it works. How is .world hosted? Is it load-balanced or otherwise optimized? Who controls registration and which other instances does it integrate with? How do you find a list of active instances to federate against? Who do you even talk to in order to federate with another instance? What does the API look like and which instances allow you to crawl them? How do bots integrate with the environment and what can an admin do to limit them? No idea.

          There’s a bunch of things I think I should be able to do but I can’t. For instance, signing into .world but only surfing content that’s hosted on .sh.itjust.works.

          There’s also a lot of petty politics. Admins deciding on a whim who to block, whether it be individuals or whole instances. Waking up one day and suddenly not having access to a dozen of my favorite subs, because two admins are feuding, is not particularly fun. I never have a problem like that on BlueSky or Instagram.

          • @[email protected]
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            We’ve already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem.

            People complain that the mainstream sites are relatively closed ecosystems, but they also complain when those sites try to be more open ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

          • @[email protected]
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            11 month ago

            a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.

            Lemmy is federalized. It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance. And I don’t see how the venture capital firm could stop them… For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we should be unshitifiable. It is possible for enshitification to happen… but it is of a greater difficulty, because the other non-shit instances still exist and they are federated, thus able to access the same content.

            They could try and pull up the drawbridge and de-federate from every other instance that isn’t under the control of the firm so that the content of the venture capital instances are exclusive, but for as long as they don’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we are good.

            It is not to hard to imagine that, if .world where to be sold like that, half or more would jump ship. At least that’s what I hope.

            • @[email protected]
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              11 month ago

              It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance.

              Why? Why wouldn’t they just consume the click bait content and shameless pandering propagated by the incoming owner, just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?

              For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances

              You don’t need 60% of instances. You need the plurality of site content. That’s what the users are coming for.

              • @[email protected]
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                11 month ago

                just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?

                As I said, Lemmy is federalized. Jumping from Twitter to BlueSky/Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy is difficult due to the network effect. The people you want to follow aren’t posting on BlueSky/Mastodon/Lemmy because there isn’t an audience there. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

                However, Lemmy is federalised, that means you can change instances without loosing access to the people/content you follow. Sure, the fediverse isn’t immune to corporate takeover, but it is more resilient.

                Migrating from Reddit means you loose access to all Reddit content. Migrating from .world to, I don’t know…, .ml means nothing sense you can still access .world’s content.

                You need the plurality of site content

                I wouldn’t say plurality. If the biggest instance only had 10% of total content, that 10% being taken over by a corp wouldn’t kill Lemmy. That 10% would be too little to perform the drawbridge strategy and so people could migrate to a different instance and access the same content.

    • @[email protected]
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      51 month ago

      Bluesky is (in theory) federated, but I think you can’t run your own server yet. We’ll see if they keep their promise.

      Its protocol has some improvements over ActivityPub, for example you can use a domain name you own as your username even if you’re not hosting your own instance, and your user identity is portable in that case - you can move to a different instance but keep the same username.

      • capital
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        21 month ago

        They took crypto bros VC money.

        Do we really think they’ll allow mass federation without getting returns on their investment?

        • @[email protected]
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          21 month ago

          It would be an abdicaton of the duties of the people in charge of running the business of bluesky to not create leverage points where serious monetization can occur.

          Like seriously… that is called Not Doing Your Job and usually leads to getting replaced by someone who will.

          I feel like it is too easy to get stuck in the weeds discussing arcane details of a massively complex system such as ActivityPub and bluesky and the virtues and faults of those details while ignoring the much more easy to predict and understand truth that decentralization is fundamentally at odds with monetization or consolidated control.

          Investors in bluesky coughed up the money for the same reason any sane person invests large sums of money…to get more money.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 month ago

      What’s the difference, really? Aren’t they both decentralized microblogging social networks?

      • @[email protected]
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        141 month ago

        One is a product with investors selling itself on promises of decentralization (bluesky), the other is a genuine community tool (mastodon) that actually provides decentralization.

        • Communist
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          11 month ago

          Bluesky is mit licensed, if it goes bad what’s to stop a fork? Once there’s interop between the protocols will it matter at all?

          • @[email protected]
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            11 month ago

            There are a million ways open platforms can be undermined, especially when serious money stands to be gained from it. See basically all of human history as exhibit A…

          • @[email protected]
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            11 month ago

            Not 100% sure but I don’t think anything would stop either a fork or a new app that uses the same protocol.

            • Communist
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              11 month ago

              I really don’t see how it could matter tbh

              I think lemmy should get atproto support too.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 month ago

        BlueSky isn’t decentralised yet. Right now the only thing that is decentralized is data storage. You can’t set up an independent federated instance yet. They promise they will add that feature, but it hasn’t happened yet.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 month ago

      I wish some entrepreneur had instead created an amazing fucking Mastodon instance and put all that marketing and engineering dollar into the platform. But you can’t own Mastodon so you can’t ever sell Mastodon so those types of folks will never invest in Mastodon. We could just say “fuck ‘em” but they have done a serious job of monopolizing the time of all the talented people who know how to make something like this go.

  • @[email protected]
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    511 month ago

    Countdown until it turns out that everybody associated with any competition to Musk’s companies just so happens to be a criminal Trump siccs his DOJ after: 5… 4…

    • @[email protected]
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      151 month ago

      I wouldn’t discount the possibility that bsky is backed by the same dark money pool that bought twitter. putin found that it’s way too easy to buy elections worldwide just using social media. They’ll never give it up.

  • @[email protected]
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    431 month ago

    X will likely merge with TruthSocial as the defacto Conservative/Right-wing social media site (named something dumb like “XTruthXSocialX”), while BlueSky will become the defacto Liberal social media site.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      91 month ago

      That would be great - much better than the current situation where twitter is run like a right-wing site but still has people from across the political spectrum hanging out there due to inertia.

    • @[email protected]
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      41 month ago

      Can you imagine taking X (formerly Twitter) public again with a merger with $DJT? Holy smokes.

  • @[email protected]
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    351 month ago

    These kind of articles always remind me whenever a new MMORPG launched, and then people claimed it would be the World of Warcraft killer.

    • @[email protected]
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      On the other hand, the track record of old social networks is not great.

      And it’s reasonable to posit Twitter is deep into the enshitifiication cycle.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 month ago

        Depends what “side” you’re on and what content you choose to engage with I guess.

        Because features wise it’s better than ever I’d say, I’m not even sure what stuff they added or removed that would’ve made the platform worse.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 month ago

          I’d posit the algorithm has turned it into a monster.

          Attention should be dictated more by chronological order and what others retweet, not what some black box thinks will keep you glued to the screen, and it felt like more of the former in the old days. This is a subtle, but also very significant change.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 month ago

        Most definitely.

        It’s seen better days and current expansion is kinda meh, but it’s still leading the amount of active players by a lot over all other MMO games.

        • @[email protected]
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          It’s really hard to know for sure, because Blizzard don’t release statistics, but according to ActivePlayer.io, Final Fantasy XIV has more active players than World of Warcraft.

          But there are other websites which put World of Warcraft in the lead. It’s also worth mentioning that World of Warcraft has much higher twitch statistics than FFXIV.

          • @[email protected]
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            11 month ago

            Hm last I checked it said WoW had a lot more, I think mostly due to the new expansion at the time. But I think different sources are stating different things, they’re pretty unclear where they get the numbers from anyway, there’s little consistency with other statistics online.

            • @[email protected]
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              11 month ago

              It’s hard to get exact numbers from WoW because they’re not publicly available. You might be right that WoW is still the biggest, I found some other numbers that disagree. WoW’s twitch numbers seem to be way higher.

              I’ll edit my comment

              • @[email protected]
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                Yeah I was looking at Twitch numbers too, but honestly it’d still be a wild guess why it’s that much higher. Could also be that they do something with Twitch drops, it essentially doesn’t say much about player count itself.

                I know previously it was because of world-first races, but I’m not sure if that’s still the case.

                • @[email protected]
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                  11 month ago

                  There’s probably quite a bit of content still that is playing “World of Warcraft” but it’s more like a “just chatting” kind of stream, if you know what I mean - WoW is a safe, comfy game to have on in the background while talking about other stuff.

    • JoYo 🇺🇸
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      11 month ago

      I mean, plenty of other games have had way more concurrent players.

  • I Cast Fist
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    281 month ago

    Ha ha ha, yeah, sure. Bluesky won’t defeat xitter, at best it’ll just be the “next thing” once xitter finally finishes getting rid of most of its users, which I guess will take more than 4 years from now.

    • @[email protected]
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      The great thing about BlueSky is how under-the-radar its flown for the last few years. Virtually no advertising. No legions of bot accounts spamming with invites and generic attention baiting posts. No |>u33y N |3io blowing up my mentions. No enshittification, because its just a primitive clone of the original Bird Site.

      The more popular it gets, the less likely that’ll last. BlueSky won’t defeat Twitter until it becomes Twitter.

      • @[email protected]
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        111 month ago

        It will almost certainly become Twitter as it was created by the Twitter founder. The only difference being that it will become the Twitter from before Musk took over. Which is a massive difference.

        • @[email protected]
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          111 month ago

          The only difference being that it will become the Twitter from before Musk took over.

          Dorsey is just as emotionally stunted and socially reactionary as Musk. He simply isn’t as wealthy.

          BlueSky has thrived not because Dorsey crafted it into a purer vision, but because he’s neglected it and allowed the user base to have their way.

          • @[email protected]
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            91 month ago

            I never liked Twitter to begin with so I’m not one to defend him. My preferred one is Mastodon, but generally I don’t like the format to begin with. At any rate, I’ll still take pre-musk Twitter over Xitter any day.

            • @[email protected]
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              51 month ago

              Things were better before they got worse, sure.

              But the problem in these systems is the trade off between centralization (consolidated control and monolithic content) and federation (poor navigation/petty administrative feuds/less quality content). Switching from Twitter to BlueSky relieves you from the current admin’s fuckups, but you’re still stuck in a flawed system.

              • @[email protected]
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                21 month ago

                I fully agree. When I feel like using a Twitter like platform (which is exceedingly rare), I use Mastodon

        • @[email protected]
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          51 month ago

          It’s worse than that.

          Blockchain Capital LLC was co-founded by Steve Bannon pal Brock Pierce, a major crypto advocate, perennial presidential candidate, and close friend of Eric Adams. Pierce has dozens of other shady MAGA/Russia ties as well.

          https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476797192400901

          Dorsey’s already out, the people running the project are from the TESCREAL gang.

      • capital
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        My issue with BS is it took VC money from crypto bros.

        What do we think will happen when they come looking for their returns on investment?

      • @[email protected]
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        91 month ago

        I guess they don’t consider it bluesky defeating twitter if twitter is commiting suicide. Sounds like pedantry to me.

          • @[email protected]
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            The key factor in Digg’s demise was a flawed design that was too easily abused by users. Digg had no controls over user verification, so individuals could game the system by creating multiple accounts to artificially inflate the number of votes for their own content. Because Digg displayed content in order of popularity, most visitors saw and voted only on content that was already popular. This system created a vicious cycle in which a small number of dedicated users could push their own content to the front page and thereby gain more followers, allowing them to more easily repeat the process. As Digg grew, so too did its problems related to power-hungry users cheating and gaining undue influence over content.

            Sounds like the same problem that every centralized social media ecosystem suffers from. The big difference between Digg and Reddit was that Reddit successfully monetized the “push me to the front of the queue” algorithm rather than engineering around it.

    • @[email protected]
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      31 month ago

      It’ll only defeat X if corporations and specifically media and sports entities start using it.

  • Account_93
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    281 month ago

    99% of my Feed on Bluesky was just people saying they’ve left Twitter for Bluesky. No amount of suggest less of this helped.

    • @[email protected]
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      271 month ago

      happens on every “new” social media platform that is similar to another social media platform. Was all over Lemmy when people were “boycotting” reddit…course most went right back to reddit when the boycotting was over.

        • bruhSoulz
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          71 month ago

          Morrowind would keep me there but i dont really have much to say about it anyways in terms of posts (that hasnt already been said) so ion need it myself :3

      • @[email protected]
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        21 month ago

        Can’t tell you how many “I’m moving to Google+” posts I saw back in the day. I wonder how that panned out for them…

    • @[email protected]OP
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      111 month ago

      Haha there is a gigantic wave of people switching over from twitter right now, that’s just what is on people’s minds. The conversation will move on soon enough.

    • Ghostalmedia
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      51 month ago

      Just like when Threads launched and or when Reddit made the API changes. You get a flood of new users who want to talk about being new users.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 month ago

      On my feed it’s just pictures of pets and people who I don’t know making lists of things they like. But to be fair, I just installed the app today.

  • @[email protected]
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    231 month ago

    It needs A) same functionality B) ban all forms of racism, especially Zionism and C) refuse investment from undemocratic nations like GCC or China

      • @[email protected]
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        151 month ago

        What’s with the consistent amount of “American Democracy is dead” rhetoric I’ve been seeing lately? It’s not like Trump is president yet. And sure, Biden isn’t going to make too much impact as a lame duck, but even after Trump takes office again, there’s a lot he can do, and a whole lot more he won’t be able to. The power is still in the hands of the people, especially at the local level. America’s democracy isn’t dead, and saying anything of the sort is obeying in advance.

        • @[email protected]
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          Oh you sweet summer child.

          A key component of 2016-2020 was Trump was surrounded by people who wouldn’t, including generals who wouldn’t entertain his talk of maybe using nukes. It’s not that he couldn’t in 2016-2020, it’s that he was surrounded by people who wouldn’t and he didn’t know how himself.

          That’s no longer the case. And the people around him have studied up on how.

          One of his first big speeches post win this week, claiming to be about defending 1A, he states he’s going to use/mobilize “my Department of Justice” to prosecute anyone trying to enforce the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act is the thing that keeps polling locations safe and neutral. The Hatch Act prevents the threatening of voters in or within 100yds of polling locations, as well as making the buying of votes illegal. That latter part keeps voting free.

          Think about the possibilities. Think hard. In fact, if you’re a creative type, sit down and write a short story about what that could look like on the present political climate.

          He’s reading a script, the entire speech lacks his usual meandering bullshit. It’s cagey. He totally didn’t write it. The only piece that smells like trump is the piece about no longer being able to ban social media accounts without a court order, probably because that’s personal for him.

          And remember. SCOTUS basically said he can do anything while President without fear of prosecution. It’s simply that Biden is unwilling to go there that we haven’t seen what that looks like yet.

          I don’t read hard left media for this info. I listen to direct talk, from Trump, from his people, and listen to/read interviews with individuals in or very close to the 2016-2020 term. I then find a historian or lawyer who can add nuance. I then read the hive mind of We The People and other countries for more perspective.

        • @[email protected]
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          171 month ago

          Yea, have you heard about project 2025?

          With choosing trump, the American people have chosen that they approve that project.

          At least, so do I see it.

        • ඞmir
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          Have you seen Project 2025, Trump’s unofficial but kind of official election plan? Republicans have all three branches of government now. They would have to willingly choose to not follow their own proposed plan, and there’s no reason to do that. So, logically, they will execute it - and that’s it. The end of US democracy.

          Go read it or summaries of it if you think it’s hyperbole.

          • @[email protected]
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            51 month ago

            It’s not a bullet list or headline so they’re going to continue to ignore all 996 pages of it.

        • @[email protected]
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          If you tell people now that Democracy is dead, they don’t bother fighting the real fight, if and when push comes to shove.

          Dems said this election is the end of Democracy, but still put an uninspiring right candidate. They said Trump is the fascist danger to all the US stands for. But having him and his crownies dismantled by getting criminal charges on them seemed to go too far. When grassroots movements came up and demanded change instead of embracing them, taking them seriously and talking with them properly, they were shunned and pushed down.

          Now the greatest danger to corporate America are people to start organizing and taking to the streets. So hammer down the defeatist message, so the people suck up to their corporate overlords. The corporate overlords who won yet another election as both candidates represented their class interests.

          • @[email protected]
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            61 month ago

            I just don’t see how that broken down old man who says they’re eating the cats and dogs is inspiring to anyone. But then I don’t vote on inertia.

            • @[email protected]
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              11 month ago

              Because Trump voters are poorly educated, and frankly, stupid.

              You heard something about eating cats and dogs, they heard someone telling them that Those people they don’t like are doing horrible things, and he will make things even with Those people.

              Literally a dog whistle, but you have to be a blithering moron to understand it, because anyone who isn’t just hears a senile old dumbass saying stupid shit.

              • @[email protected]
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                11 month ago

                One of my parents, not Trumpers in spite of age, thinks Vance is trolling him to 25th him later. Either way, that tired, not looking too good medically, old man isn’t likely for long going forward. I think this is a Vance, Heritage, Musk game. Game in full essence of the word where Musk is concerned. That egomaniacal child of Apartheid is even playing with Putin. Evidence even of thwarting Ukraine insofar as he is able.

                • @[email protected]
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                  11 month ago

                  I’m not sure I buy that: Trump is a cult, and his cultists are going to have an absolute riotous fit if someone tries to depose him.

                  Short of him dying or doing something you just can’t ignore - like, say, he eats shit out of his diaper on national tv - he’s not going anywhere.

                  Vance isn’t smart enough to 6D chess his way into the presidency without his nominal constituency rioting over it, so I’m doubtful that’s his play.

                  He’s probably just going to pull the last-guy-in-the-room thing, since that’s the only person Trump listens to or remembers anyway which means you keep the cultists happy AND you get the figurehead to do what you want anyways without the mess.

          • @[email protected]
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            11 month ago

            All you are describing really only suggests that American democracy has been dead for even longer, not that it isn’t dead yet.

      • @[email protected]
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        They should definitely not allow investment from anyone associated with Trump admin, the Pentagon etc.

    • @[email protected]
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      161 month ago

      That’s not going to happen here. Am I the only one who watched Trumps speech claiming to be about 1A? He is coming for social media day 1, to reinforce Elon Musk, not only on Twitter, but all other large social media platforms (he doesn’t name FB and Reddit, but he’s talking about FB and Reddit, maybe as far down as Lemmy, BlueSky & Mastadon too, idk).

      He says he’s going to mobilize “my Department of Justice” to do it.

      He specifically says: making account removal/banning only possible via court order, removing moderation, and removing any labels of misinformation or disinformation.

      He’s already threatening YouTube with removal of section 230, if they moderate content.

      Why is no one talking about this?

        • @[email protected]
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          21 month ago

          It’s a YouTube video of his speech. Asmongold has a reaction video as do other people who make their living on YouTube, but the shortest take is the original posted by that dipshit RFK Jr. 6min. Only 234k views, probably because it’s buried on RFK Jrs bullshit. It’s the vid with the giant green crayon all caps subtitles. Idk why they captioned it that way, but, they did.

          https://youtu.be/xJfUXVOoFBo?si=7zP2Et5QGSt5dW20

      • @[email protected]
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        31 month ago

        If I was being honest I’d add “literally anyone whos firm has any connections to a NATO government” but then I’d be called a consoiracy theorist. But as for GCC, that’s a more direct threat to lives of dissidents.

    • @[email protected]
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      71 month ago

      yeah I don’t think a usa based platform is really “long gaming” the fee speech problem. Bluesky now shifting to monetization plans. Its a matter of time until some rich dildo buys it up. If were lucky it will be mark cuban or somebody buts its still grim prospects.

      • @[email protected]
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        “Fee speech” is a serendipitous typo. Or maybe you meant it. First I’ve heard it, anyway.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 month ago

        Cuban has deleted much of his anti trump talk, high odds the man is hunkering down.

        Remember, trumps been promising vengeance to “enemies” for well over a year now, and now he has immunity from prosecution.