Good fucking riddance. (No offense cool innocent Russian people.)

Good. Let it stay that fucking way.

Raise your hand if you want to read the suspect’s manifesto!

One doesn’t have to go far to find a boot-licking class traitor who thinks if they run the rat race well enough they’ll get a piece of cheese.

But to be fair to the McDonalds worker, the cash reward is designed to do just that.

That’s fucking crazy. Anyone notice how AI has only made everything shittier?

Until we have a voting system where 3rd parties are viable (for example. Ranked Choice Voting, Star Voting, Approval Voting, etc.), we absolutely do not benefit in any way for the existence of more parties.

Whether intentional or not, America today is a two-party system by design. If you want more choices beyond the Democrats and Republicans, you need to help us enact voting system reforms which are necessary to allow 3rd parties to exist legitimately. We aren’t joking when we say that voting 3rd party is throwing your vote away; it very much is.

Try out a mesh network VPN like tailscale (others are available, but i haven’t tried them).

Tailscale is basically just a simple but powerful wireguard manager that does all of the work of setting up a mesh network for you, and it works amazingly well in my experience. The free account is good for I think 3 users and 100 devices on a network and has been the perfect thing to expose my home server to my various devices no matter where I am.

I like it so much after having used it for the last few months that I just spent way too much money upgrading my server… but that’s another thing entirely. lol

These guys smell like CEOs, and we all know what happens to CEOs.

This is a slippery slope argument.

The “problem” re TikTok is that they are a Chinese company with ties to the Chinese government who have managed to get a closed source black box app on millions of Americans phones that servers as about the most perfect avenue for social/political manipulation as any adversary could dream of.

The solution to that problem that was offered to TikTok more than a year ago was to simply sell to an American company (and thus a company that could in theory be held somewhat accountable, but probably not if we’re being honest) for doing bad things here in the USA. ByteDance would have made billions of dollars selling the American version of TikTok, but they knowingly chose the other option, which was to face a ban at the end of this year.

FWIW, American companies cannot operator or sell product in China without going through a Chinese company, and social media platforms like Facebook are banned in China, so in my opinion some degree of reciprocity here is at least warranted.

TikTok could have sold to an American company (read: a company that we can hold legally accountable for bad things that their product does) and made billions of dollars in the process. They chose not to, for some reason, and thus knowingly opted to face a ban in the United States. Those were the options and they knew it.

As I understand it American companies doing business in China almost always have to go through a Chinese company in order to operate legally and make products available to the Chinese market. Platforms like Facebook are already banned in China and must be accessed through a VPN because they don’t play ball with the Chinese regime, so why should it not be reciprocal?

Until TikTok is being managed and operated by a company that can be held legally accountable here in America, they are nothing but a security threat and a backdoor for the Chinese government into every cell phone of every person who is dumb enough to install that shit. Is that what the people want to hear? Probably not, but it’s the truth.

I wouldn’t install TikTok on my phone any sooner than I’d install RedStarOS on my PC, because the implications of using a proprietary, closed source application with ties to the Chinese regime should be fucking obvious to anyone with bare minimum technical knowledge. Likewise, I wouldn’t blame a Chinese person for being skeptical of Microsoft Windows or X.com for their close relationship with the American government. To think otherwise is just not smart.

From China’s perspective, Facebook probably IS a “national security risk”, which is why it is already banned over there.

For American to do business and sell products in China, they almost always have to go through a Chinese company. I’m sure that’s part capitalism and part accountability theater, but it’s just a fact. So why is it such an outrage for America to ask TikTok to do the same?

It’s not “censorship” to ban a product like TikTok any more than it’s censorship to ban any other product. TikTok had the opportunity to sell to an American company (the same way all products on the Chinese market are forced to go through Chinese companies) and, for reasons that only they can explain, they chose not to do that. They would have made billions of dollars selling, but perhaps money isn’t their primary concern…

At any rate, we absolutely need to have a separate conversation about all social media in terms of privacy and data rights (though it’ll never happen under Republicans), but that doesn’t mean TikTok is free to continue being a completely opaque and unaccountable backdoor to the Chinese government.

Mark my words: generative “AI” is the tech bubble of all tech bubbles.

It’s an infinite supply of “content” in a world of finite demand. While fast, it is incredibly inefficient at creating anything, often including things with dubious quality at best. And finally, there seems to be very little consumer interest in paid-for, commercial generative AI services. A niche group of people are happy to use generative AI while it’s available for free, but once companies start charging for access to services and datasets, the number of people who are interested in paying for it will obviously be significantly smaller.

Last I checked there was more than a TRILLION dollars of investment into generative AI across the US economy, with practically zero evidence of genuinely profitable business models that could ever lead to any return on investment. The entire thing is a giant money pit, and I don’t see any way in which someone doesn’t get left holding the $1,000,000,000,000 generative AI bag.

Sure, that’s definitely nice in theory.

In practice, however, because the client is closed source and there’s no way to self-host and instance, BlueSky users will eventually find themselves at the whims of the people/person who controls the software. What’s to stop some Elon Musk type from buying BlueSky next and then adding things to your algorithm without your consent?

That’s why I’m very skeptical of BlueSky’s pseudo-federation, as it feels like people are just making the same mistakes (with regard to corporate social media) over and over again. Unlike Mastodon (which I understand is less popular right now and thus the network/peer effect is weaker for people), the users have very little control over BlueSky as a platform, and that feels like a mistake.

With all that said, priority numero uno should simply be to get people off of shit like X.com and TikTok, which aren’t just at risk of becoming toxic playgrounds of oligarchs, but already are. If people choose BlueSky as the next corporate platform to go to, it’s a small step in the right direction, but it’s worth proceeding with caution.

I’ve found tons of new “content” on Mastodon by following hashtags related to the things I like.

Personally I like the fact that I’m not being fed some corporate algorithm.

There’s a lot you aren’t taking into consideration, for example where those users are coming from.

• Threads is just Instagram, it’s essentially the same account, so its users were baked in from the start. How many of those Threads users are just people who already used Instagram?
• BlueSky really isn’t pulling users from Mastodon, it’s pulling them from “X.com”, which if nothing else represents a breaking up of old Twitter, which is good for decentralization in general. Any fracturing of social media is good for the fediverse.
• Both Threads and BlueSky are, to some degree, copies of Mastodon in terms of their relationship with federation. Threads uses ActivityPub itself (a win for the fediverse, depending on how you look at it), and BlueSky has their own AT federation protocol, which shows that the ideas behind the fediverse are already winning out. It’s entirely possible that, at some point in the future, BlueSky and Mastodon learn to speak to each other using one of those protocols (or a new one), and then the fediverse wins by default.
• Fediverse apps like Misskey are apparently doing great in Japan, which is great for the existence of Japanese artists and the international side of things.

The fact that we’re here, right now, discussing this on the fediverse, shows that ActivityPub has come a long way. Bluesky is nothing more than a shallow copy of Mastodon with far less federation and far fewer features.

Mastodon is a bit like Linux, due to its free and open nature. It can be in 3rd place for 20 years, but it’ll keep chugging along, improving and growing over time until it snowballs into something truly formidable. Linux doesn’t need to be the most popular operating system ecosystem to be great, nor does Mastodon need to be the most popular social media server. Unlike a corporate product it’s not just going to die and disappear just because it isn’t the most popular of the social media platforms.

Yeah I don’t know why it took people so fucking long to realize that being on Twitter does nothing other than help the oligarchs, but here we are…

BlueSky is really just Twitter pretending to be Mastodon, but that’s a minor issue compared to the problems associated with platforms like “X” and TikTok today.

What matters most right now is killing off Twitter and breaking up the dominance of any one platform on social media. I really don’t care where people go as long as they get the fuck off of Twitter and TikTok. Mastodon and open platforms will eventually win out in a divided social media ecosystem anyway, in my opinion. Divide and conquer.

Corporate nationalist social media like “X” (American oligarchy) and TikTok (Chinese oligarchy) are a danger to the sovereignty and stability of the Western world.

Oligarchs get cozy with oligarchs, what a shocker.