The dark cowboy rides again.

If you can buy a ten and one works, you’ve saved money. Two work and you’re making money. The only question is whether the tenth card really will work or not.

I’ve been hearing about the imminent crash for the last two years. New money keeps getting injected into the system. The bubble can’t deflate while both the public and private sector have an unlimited lung capacity to keep puffing into it. FFS, bitcoin is on a tear right now, just because Trump won the election.

This bullshit isn’t going away. Its only going to get forced down our throats harder and harder, until we swallow or choke on it.

My real point is that if they had been more subtle Lincoln would absolutely have let them keep slavery.

Lincoln wouldn’t have enjoyed the majorities necessary to rewrite the Constitution without the Civil War. He’d have been in the same position as Quincy Adams or Filmore, two outspoken abolitionists who lacked the tools to functionally end the practice.

The war, the voluntary dissolution of opposition in Congress, and the massive depopulation that neutered immediate blowback left the door wide open for revolutionary change. And Lincoln - unlike his successor Johnson or even more distant successor Truman - walked through that doorway. That’s what makes Lincoln significant - he was presented with a serious opportunity to affect change and he took it, when less lucky presidents never had the opportunity and less moral presidents never had the conviction.

A lesson the modern South seems to understand well if the last few decades of the Republican party are any example.

What makes guys like Trump and Bush Jr so horrifying is the fact that they did pounce on their opportunities to affect radical change. The Republican Party is seizing their moment and reinventing the country while the Dems dither, trying to extract as much personal profit from the decaying system.

The modern South is a consequence of bold Republicans capitalizing on a wellspring of white nationalism that’s been bubbling up since the Civil Rights Era, while Democrats seek to apologize for FDR/Kennedy/LBJ and sell off a generation of progressive reform to the highest bidder. When you look at the Dem strategy in states like Texas and Florida, you see this in spades. Candidates falling over themselves to prove they hate student protesters and brown foreigners and union advocates as much as any Republican.

The lesson we’re all learning is that you might as well try to reign in hell, cause heaven is a lost cause.

Or drinking from the same well of propaganda.

The idea that men can be duped by a wall of Murdoch press but women can’t seems dubious.

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.

Lincoln was totally willing to keep slavery to end the civil war.

The thing about Lincoln wasn’t that he was willing to keep slavery to end the war. Virtually everyone was willing to do that.

Lincoln was willing to end slavery to end the war. This was the truly revolutionary view and the reason he’s so celebrated.

So he freed the southern slaves and ordered the South burned to the ground instead

I don’t think you get to rampage all the way into Gettysburg, looting and burning and raping and massacring your way straight through the heart of the Midwest, and then discover moralism during Sherman’s March.

He wasn’t the abolitionist hero American history portrays him as.

He literally was, though. He wielded abolition, first as a weapon to bleed the Confederacy dry and then as a sucture to knit a new nation out of the 13th-15th amendments.

He achieved policy the most radical abolitionists hadn’t even dreamed of ten years prior. An absolute living legend.

If only he’d made Butler his VP or… idk… ducked.

The majority of white women voted for Trump, tho

That wouldn’t make for a pithy comic punchline

the other guy comes off as, “Phew, I was just making small talk and don’t actually care how you’re doing.”

What if the other guy is also depressed or otherwise dealing with his own shit and just looking for pleasant socialization rather than emotional baggage carrying?

Is it possible for two people to enjoy each other’s company without airing all their dirty laundry on each other?

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.

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.

If you are going to walk around with a mangled blood gushing hand for a prolonged period of time, without seeking help

Some wounds don’t heal.

Any time I’m having strong feelings, simply turn off my emotions and become an automaton that exists to serve others.

My bosses love it. I’m going straight to the top. And once I’m finally in charge, I’ll be free to dump all my emotional baggage on my underlings while insisting they need to toughen up.

The comic character is doing it “right” by not making it the other guy’s problem.

Part of the problem is that there’s a gray area on this discussion and easy to find yourself on either side.

On the one side, “my hand has been crushed and I need immediate medical attention” is something other people need to respect. And “I can’t help you with both hands because one of them is crushed” is something other people need to respect. And “my chronic hand pain makes me grumpy”, too.

On the other, if you’re not talking to a doctor or asking for help getting to a doctor, starting every conversation with “My hand hurts” begs the question “what do you want me to do about it?” And if every request to socialize is met with “Can’t do anything hand hurts”, eventually you stop getting calls.

So what’s the fair middle ground? Hard to say and varies heavily by audience. But people do love to paint on the extreme ends without addressing the mushy middle.

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.

refuse investment from undemocratic nations like GCC or China

:-/

I mean, this is one of the central pitches behind Web3.0/Crypto. Everything has a digital tag and its all going to be portable between platforms.

Did it come to fruition? No, of course not. Its all a pile of scams. But then so was Web2.0 and Web1.0 during their heydays.