If our political system worked we’d have wonderful heart-grabbing ads on TV about all the people who have meaningful jobs thanks to DEI. It wouldn’t be hard to make the Repubs look like Scrooges. Get people riled up. Another ad, about the people Trump pardoned and what they’re doing now. Wait till one of them commits a major crime and run Willie Horton style ads. Make it understood who these people actually are. Trump has to own each and every one of them. This really isn’t hard. But the Dems think campaigns end. They don’t end. #Another ad. Donald Trump on Mt Rushmore. Donald Trump on the $20 bill. The Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial renamed Trump. Kennedy airport in NYC renamed Trump International. In the future the US will have one founding father: Donald J. Trump.#
I thought this excerpt from Krugman's piece about his move back to blogging was right on. "For a while I tried to make up for the loss of the blog with threads on Twitter. But even before Elon Musk Nazified the site, tweet threads were an awkward, inferior substitute for blog posts." There's a need for a system that combines the full-featured writing of blogging and the timelines of twitter-like systems. #
- Could what happened to Twitter, happen there?#
- To determine, ask yourself if you could continue to use it if it was acquired by a billionaire for their own personal political use?#
- What would you switch to?#
- Would you have to give up your history and followers?#
- And developers, what would you do if the billionaire acquirer dropped support for the api? How expensive and time consuming would it be to convert to a different protocol? Would you even bother?#
- We’ve learned a lot from the billionaire acquisition of twitter. The answer to these questions made a lot of us think we’d never want to do this again. But despite all the misleading hype, we very much are repeating the mistakes.#
- The current owners of Bluesky would be crazy if they closed off the opportunity to get rich. But they shouldn’t be misleading users and developers into believing that it’s safe to trust this as an open platform that couldn’t be acquired and have its utility consumed the way twitter's was.#
- This started as a thread on Bluesky of course. :-)#
- PS: Spoiler -- Bluesky is, as it is currently configured, not billionaire-proof. It's going to get acquired, it probably already has, based on what they're doing. Remember, pay attention to what they do, not what they say. It's just as true in tech as it is in politics, and these days, what's the difference anyway? #
- PPS: If you're thinking ahh but there's AT Protocol, our ace in the hole. Please. Twitter had an API too. It didn't make a difference. And AT Proto won't either unless there are proven systems that people are actually using that peer with Bluesky's servers, so those users can't be sold to the billionaire. We're nowhere near that. No one can say with any certainty that it's even possible. At this point the continued support of the API is entirely up to the owners of Bluesky. They could change it, break developers or completely drop it and the users and developers would have no recourse. #
- PPPS: Can you imagine the founders of Bluesky wouldn't take $20 million each for their share? #