It doesn’t need to be effective, because the pendulum of politics always swings back in the end. Trump will become the next scapegoat of American politics just like he was back in 2018 and then 2020. If the economy tops itself (as is increasingly likely), they’ll be facing even bigger headwinds. Even if it doesn’t, inflation and sky high rents aren’t going away. Consumer debt isn’t getting any lighter. The Trump Admin isn’t going to be nice to people.

That’s the electoral strategy at the end of the day. Just to keep being the Other Option and wait for people to come around. Wait as long as it takes. Maybe it’ll take twenty years, like in Arizona. Maybe forty years, like in Georgia. Maybe it’ll be over 60, like in Utah. Doesn’t matter. Just keep squatting on the Other Option until the day comes.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Approval Voting. But any time I try to explain the idea of “the most popular candidate winning”, people get angry at the idea of populism.

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.

the GOP has gotten more extreme in many ways

They ate the Dixiecrats, who were already openly white nationalist. But it’s the same extremism, just migrated from one party to the other by way of the oil and automotive industry barons.

Looking back at what the John Birch folks said back then, it’s a lot more mainstream.

The Birchers were mainstream. They got Goldwater in '68 and Reagan in '80. The Tea Party and the MAGA movement can trace straight lines back to Bircher organizers and funders.

I’m just not as confident that the anti democratic sentiment isn’t just rhetoric meant for political theatre.

The problem is that most of the damage is already done. The VRA has been shredded. House seats are heavily gerrymandered. Systematic disenfranchisement is institutionalized. Media is captured by corporate interests loyal (or at least amenable) to the party. There’s not a whole lot left to dismantle. Republicans have heavily entrenched, functionally unassailable state level majorities across the country.

The real threats the GOP face are from within - business and paleocon wings feuding over orthodoxy like 12th century Popes.

And democracy at least keeps this kind of fighting civil. Which is its purpose. Give people a non-violent outlet for civic participation, but limit the terms of debate to what the elites desire.

Nobody currently winning wants that system to change.

Are they? I see the comments still full of them.

Stuff doesn’t get cheaper, only more profitable. Trump will subsidize stock prices while the price of eggs and milk continue to climb.

Hegseth is as hawkish on Russia as he is on China. But I would be less worried as Putin than I would be as a draft-eligible American. We’re only going to double down on wars with this new guy in charge and that manpower needs to come from somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_black_sites

Sri Lanka participated in the US redition process. This image is also rather old. Very likely the Modi government has opened the back door to this shit in the last ten years.

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.

Not everyone subscribes to your ideology of lesser evilism

If they don’t subscribe to my ideology, they must be a greater evil.

if I was a German citizen who hated Nazi Germany and wanted it to fail, would that make me worse than the Nazis?

It would make you a Communist Fifth Columnist Jew-Loving Traitor and earn you a ticket straight to the camps.

The Nazis would absolutely say you were worse than them.

People don’t like the monolith when it’s over there and they don’t like it when it comes over here, either

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.

Hillary again with Bill not at all anti war–>

Directly responsible for escalation in Libya, as Sec State, and the deaths of tens of thousands as a result.

it might be worth reflecting why a lot of the electorate no longer sees the Democratic party as the anti-war party

The only reflection I am able to accomplish is to look at the GOP and say “Worse, tho”.

If you aren’t voting for the lesser evil, I have to assume you hate America and want it to fail. And that’s worse than genocide.

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.

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.

Is the problem with fascism its degree of obviousness or its consequences?

FPTP requires us to vote for people in favor of FPTP.

Even the referendum efforts slammed into a brick wall this year

RCV failed in Missouri, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, and (likely) in Alaska. People don’t like it as a system.

Rashida Tlaib won 62-38 in a district that Harris lost 43-32-15 R/D/G. The idea that Libs can’t win or that Libs won’t stop genocide is flatly false. They exist. But they’re also at the top of the AIPAC hit-list (Cori Bush and Jamal Bowmen were two other staunch anti-genocide candidates forced out during their primaries) so they have to fight for their lives in their own primaries rather than turning out the vote nationally for their candidates.

The dirty truth is that Dems can be gaslit and railroaded by a fascist white nationalist press as easily as any Republican. We saw a hard right tilt this election because we were flooded with hard right propaganda over the last two years.

Pinning the results of a tsunami of fascist media on individual voters is just blaming the victims. When your social media is owned and operated by apartheidists and gusanos why are you surprised to see voters adopt their views? Garbage In, Garbage Out.

refuse investment from undemocratic nations like GCC or China

:-/