Notices by wet forest moon folklorist (seachanger@alaskan.social)

ok i'm about to get off the internet for today but i have to say that the one thing i don't see AT ALL on bsky is any self reflection on why it wasn't more of a priority to get communities the fuck off twitter after musk bought it. plenty of slow realizations that oh wow turns out its good actually to get off of there, and that our reactions to the right's online house of terrors only fuels those same terrors.

but all of that was known 2.5 years ago

no there was not one perfect place to go. yes, collectively, the crew that is now on bluesky did and does have the capacity to address that problem by creating and supporting other types of platforms. twitter migrants DID change fedi and in big enough numbers could REALLY change it. great to see that creative energy going to bsky now but we should look at the reasons it took so long, and so many people do not feel empowered to leave bad situations or work together to make better ones

like we say, when someone shows you who they are, believe them. and musk showed us he was a delusional, racist, power hungry and dangerous billionaire long ago. and yet the world's most influential people *allowed him to frame their debates for 2.5 years* prior to the election of donald trump. you can't pull those events apart, a historian would look back and analyze their interrelated nature

when musk bought twitter, i viewed the hostile takeover as a scary symbol of fascist hijacking of democracy. it felt ominous, but i wasn't cognitively seeing it as actual politics. my head was wrong, but my gut was correct. it was bad and we needed to leave. we can now see how allowing fascists to own us symbolically threw the door wide open for them to own us electorally. we were late to see that legacy media is dead, the internet is the largest influencer of elections

people really thought ratioing elon on his own platform was credible praxis, we wasted time mocking him for losing money on breaking twitter. just as with Trump 2016, we preferred to mock the fascist as incompetent rather than recognize the power of his project & longterm goals, and the need for us to employ deep, revolutionary solidarity in fighting back. we needed to get off that platform but instead fought viciously about how doing so was "problematic" cuz we didn't have a perfect place to go

@scottymax boosting your toot into (?) #metal mastodon

y’all have your senators and representative’s office phones saved as contacts in your phone? get it done! talk to their staff about these people. educate them https://mastodon.online/@davidsirota/113524275811376214

'not all men' only applies to transmasc sorry the rest of you are the all men we're talking about

I've just contributed to BlackQueerLife. Consider supporting them too — every little helps! https://opencollective.com/blackqueerlife

snow day! not enough for skiing yet but enough for happiness #alaska

@JoeQuinlan @burnoutqueen I send Rashida small donations so I can keep her thank you postcards current up on my fridge

dams out, salmon in!

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/11/17/salmon-return-to-lay-eggs-in-historic-habitat-after-largest-dam-removal-project-in-us-history/

@MattMerk @PedestrianError @majorlinux yeah i'd say as a propaganda for that message, MSNBC has been remarkably effective. they are also perpetually mixing up the frames so people are confused about what progressive even means

like idk how this space manages to be 95% computer workers and also unable to fix its own computer problems, but that seems to be a core issue here

on the left we're clear that one thing Dems lack is a simple story about what it is we need to do, a story that names villains and heroes and puts any policy proposals in context. liberals/mainstream Dems don't understand this critique because from their perspective, the Dems DO actually have a simple story and its speaking directly to them. that's why Harris made gains this election only among people making over $100,000. that's the group that sees themselves in the Dems' narrative

its important to see clearly: the rejection of mastodon for bluesky is not a rejection of the desire to be free of our corporate overlords; its a rejection of white bros controlling digital spaces. sit with that

eugen and his interlocutors have had immense power with which to challenge twitter but their racial and cultural and ideological insularity prevented them from using it

as in USpol discourse, don't blame the electorate, find fault with those whose leadership and strategy choices disproportionately impact the electorate

mob justice is messy and you're not going to be able to find the logical throughlines you want. you want the simple universe where things succeed based on moral righteousness but irl shit is complex. sometimes the good guys are the bad guys too

there is nothing wrong with being here because everything we're doing is research, or as @inquiline said yesterday, maybe mastodon learns to walk so something else later can run. obviously @are0h has been saying this very clearly since before most of us got here, but to say the least many of you have not been listening. one of the hardest and also most important things we can do is scrub the mirror and try to see ourselves a little more clearly

what we've seen in post-musk twitter world, is that people want to be with their people, and that people want to be in communities in which Black people are free. both bluesky and mastodon inherited major racism problems and tech bro culture, but jay made different choices than eugen about how to address that inheritance. no doubt she had more cash with which to do it and that cash may be the end of bluesky too. over and over i say this: don't deny it, learn from it