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In the era of social media there's always a temptation to treat ourselves as having our own personal press offices, putting out press releases on matters of public concern. I have been resisting that temptation about Charlie Kirk's killing because who cares about my hot takes, but I really feel this deeply.
Newsom is using this opportunity to triangulate to the "moderate" position between "we should murder all trans people" and "no, don't do that".
We must remember.
His work was an explicit project to enable tragedies like the one that befell him. He said so, over and over again, along with all the other heinous shit he said all the time. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-gun-deaths-quote/
I am furious about Gavin Newsom's "continue his work" response to Charlie Kirk's killing.
There are numerous downsides to this killing. It will inflame accelerationists. It will further destabilize our politics. Two kids will grow up without a dad. A woman has lost her husband. The bell tolls for thee.
But to the extent that anything good can come from his death, it is a disruption of Charlie Kirk's *work*, and all the harm it does.
@siderea I have heard casually that if you see e.g. "bamboo socks", it's just rayon, made with bamboo pulp instead of beech trees. Marginally more renewable because of bamboo's growth rate, but only marginally.
@jwz @JessTheUnstill Everyone keeps talking about needing a Joe Rogan of the Left but have we even considered that we already *have* a Joe Rogan of a radius of a few blocks around Folsom and Harrison? Makes you think. 
Anyway I don't think we can completely align on this particular question but I definitely respect your view here. I hope we can end up in a better place in a few years… somehow.
@JessTheUnstill @jwz That is also part of my calculus here, I don't have the ear of Joe Rogan's audience to convince millions how to spend their time online, the most likely influence I could have would be an ActivityPub developer reading my analysis and integrating a feature or two from ATproto. Even if I were King of ActivityPub somehow, ActivityPub is the insurgent here and has much less room to be picky about its tactics. Generously all of fedi is still like 1/5 the size of bsky.
@JessTheUnstill @jwz Keep in mind that the claim in question is not "should we switch to bluesky", but whether I should even consider writing about how it works, because "anything I write would give it oxygen".
(I am flattered by the idea that I could even remotely affect Bluesky's billion-dollar trajectory, I can barely convince one person to give me a dollar every few months.)
@JessTheUnstill @jwz sure, I'd also accept some non-monetary return as evidence of this. Maybe I could even accept that the creation of Bluesky as a honeypot for left/liberal discourse, so that it may be more easily eventually monitored, enclosed, and destroyed, is a huge risk. But it's still a hypothetical *future* risk, not a *current* return. One that they earnestly seem to be trying to hedge against, and I think it's interesting to explore if that might work.
@jwz @JessTheUnstill And sure, the fascists have invested on their own sincere belief that it *will* generate outsize returns for them, but also, the fascists are not particularly good at believing true things or making good decisions. they're fascists, bad beliefs and bad decisions are their whole deal
@jwz @JessTheUnstill I think that funding sources can easily corrupt. I think we should be circumspect. There's a reason I'm having this conversation here rather than there, and a reason why I spent my entire Sunday getting yelled at by Mike Masnick, like a dumbass. But also, if we want to condemn the entire effort as irredeemably 100% no-nuance evil, I'd want to see that it's meaningfully capitulated on its stated goals. That seems quite murky to me; there's a lot of countervailing evidence.
@jwz @JessTheUnstill Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that Bluesky is an overt con job, grifting fascist dummies out of millions to divert funding to a project of building a robust public social media substrate. (Forget about the tech for the moment, whether the specific choices they've made have worked toward this end or not.)
Have they yet generated any *returns* for fascists that would disprove this, at least at the level of intent? Is there any indication they will do so?
@jwz I'm not drawing an equivalence; none of these are straight lines. But if we wanted to say material support for fascism disqualifies a protocol from being worth learning from, Bluesky is _taking_ money from fascists to do (maybe good?) stuff, but Mastodon _gave_ a big in-kind software labor donation to help get Truth Social and Gab off the ground. Arguably the Bluesky approach is savvier.
Everybody needs resources and the fascists are somehow the ones who have all the resources right now.
@jwz There is a level on which I agree with you; in particular I was very critical of Cory at the time for directing resources to Free Our Feeds which seemed a bit silly.
But, I also remain curious, for example, why Black users consistently report getting harassed here more than they do on Bsky, why Blacksky chose that for their technology substrate, etc.
Like, surely you, of all people, are proof that one can survive contact with the demonic octopus and still do worthwhile things?
Should I do some long-form writing about the relative merits of ActivityPub and ATproto (and the ideological positions of their adherent factions), as I have been able to understand them thus far?
I have felt for a while like there is a lot of noise on this topic, and obviously after this weekend that feeling has intensified, but I'd really like a read on whether y'all would think that my contribution would cut through it or add to it.