i should be gripping rat

  • 141 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • what’s stopping leftists in your country from using an alternate platform? i mean, i’m not going to tell you what the left in your country should do, but twitter is now an explicitly pro-Donald Trump platform and likely contributed to him winning the US election. I think leftists elsewhere in the world care about whether the US descends into full-blown fascism, because that would be generally bad for the entire world? But I could be wrong about that, I could also see people feeling like that could be a good thing for them because it would mean the US meddles less in other nations’ affairs.

    If you do think Trump winning the US election is a bad thing for your personal political aims, you should probably be looking for a way to get off twitter, because twitter is now a part of his machine.




  • It was not super clear at the outset that X was becoming a platform for fascists. We knew Musk was a shit heel capitalist, but this alone is not a reason to leave a platform. Most social media is run by selfish capitalists, it is simply the way of the world. It was becoming more apparent over the course of this year that Musk was playing with the algorithm to boost himself and people that paid him money, and we knew Musk was reinstating banned accounts in the name of “free speech”. But it wasn’t until election day (week?) when the platform explicitly endorsed Donald Trump that we knew the platform had been completely transformed into a pro-fascism platform. Remember that to most people, conservative and fascist don’t mean the same thing. My personal opinion is that the modern conservative movement has completely shifted into fascism, and anyone who says they are conservative is endorsing fascism. But this is not how the majority sees things.


  • I’ve been picking fights on reddit about this. My feeling is that X has become a neo-nazi platform, and anyone who stays on there is implicitly endorsing fascism. The popular sentiment seems to be that, even if you accept this as true, it doesn’t extend to music artists because they need to promote their music to make money. My personal feeling is that music artists do not get a pass. I don’t care if you are trying to make money. Preventing fascism is more important than making money. There are many non-fascist platforms that you could promote your music on.

    Am I off base with this? I mean, I hate corporations and capitalism and view them as the main evils of our modern world, yet I work for an evil corporation at my day job. I think I get a pass because I need to make money to live. Am I a hypocrite?







  • Luckily, decentralized social media is on the rise. Lemmy, while still comparatively small, has a fairly active user base; and while Mastodon has not (and likely will not) ever be mainstream, even Bluesky is technically decentralized as well (I think).

    The paradox of modern social media. Twitter was only good because it was packed with normies, which gave a sense of being part of global conversations that included more than just your subset of weirdos. Bluesky is only becoming good because the normies are finally moving over. However, like Twitter, Bluesky is currently a centralized platform. The simplicitly of centralization is why the normies are there. It’s also the reason why Bluesky is doomed to eventually end up like Twitter, unless Jay Graber and the other shareholders magically decide that the initial growth phase is enough and they don’t need to grow anymore. But this is capitalism, and we all know how this ends up. Jack Dorsey may have had lofty goals for Bluesky, but he doesn’t even work there anymore. The neverending demand for growth will push Bluesky to end up exactly like Twitter, perhaps even ending in another purchase by a billionaire fascist. It is inevitable.

    At least Beehaw is cool and nonprofit.