This has such MSI “there will be no bad dragons on my watch” vibes.

Based on the photos of the mascots, there’s no way they didn’t hire a furry to draw those.

IMO, I think creative people are at the heart of a social media platform. A big part of art is the community aspect of sharing it with others. So they interact with each other as well as create Content ™ for others. This is especially obvious with platforms like YouTube, but even Twitter is like this. If there weren’t people posting photos, drawings, music, game dev posts, and livestreams, Twitter would be a very different place. Creative people are responsible for much of the original content online. Without them, Twitter would basically be news, political rants, and reposted memes.

Twitter was largely considered the best place for artists by process of elimination, and I know plenty of artists were dying for an alternative but didn’t have one. Places like DeviantArt don’t get traffic from the general populace, and Instagram’s algorithm is horrible for discoverability. With Bluesky getting enough people to make it worth the migration, the creative people are moving over, and their followers will join them.

I know the only reason I ever made a Twitter account was because 70% of the people I followed on Tumblr left for Twitter after the porn ban. Hell, Tumblr dropped like 99.7% in value after the porn ban because they drove off almost their entire userbase.

Nor would they care if they knew about it.

I think “leave” is doing some heavy lifting, but I could see plenty of people creating accounts as the site reaches a large enough user base to attract the general public.

I saw a video recently of somebody talking about how they were posting the same thing on Twitter and Bluesky, and despite having a fraction of the followers on Bluesky, the post there had like 6x the engagement compared to Twitter. As they put it, “The creatives have moved to Bluesky.”

Tumblr used to let you edit other people’s comments. That’s close, right?

Fun fact(s): The COVID strains that were active at the beginning of last year were actually more infectious and deadlier than the original COVID strains. The only reason we didn’t hear much about them is because, despite RFK Jr’s beliefs, the vaccines work. 443 people died from COVID in the US during the first week of November, even with the vaccines. There were about 15 deaths from the flu in that same week.

There are plenty of immunocompromised people who can’t get vaccinated who can no longer be in public without risking death now that COVID is endemic.

I heard that the dude making jet fuel ended up immigrating to some place called the United States and started a real estate empire.

Yeah, I figured you didn’t mean that and wasn’t trying to imply that you did, lol. I was just trying to specify that when I was talking about the Wright Brothers I meant the technological jumps between their first flight and the moon landing. We’re probably several technological leaps away from anything that could be considered actual AI.

The Wright Brothers didn’t figure out the moon landing. They figured out aerodynamics. There were plenty of other discoveries that went into the moon landing such as suborbital flight, supersonic flight, and orbital dynamics to list a few. It’s less about the specific time as it is about the level of technology. The timescale is much harder to put down due to the nature of technological innovation.

As for the rest, I completely agree. One of the most dangerous things about these AI programs is the lack of responsibility or culpability.

Definitely not a question of AI sentience, I’d say we’re as close to that as the Wright Brothers were to figuring out the Apollo moon landing. But, it definitely raises questions on whether or not we should be giving everybody access to machines that can fabricate erroneous statements like this at random and what responsibility the companies creating them have if their product pushes someone to commit suicide or radicalizes them into committing an act of terrorism or something. Because them shrugging and saying, “Yeah, it does that sometimes. We can’t and won’t do anything about it, though” isn’t gonna cut it, in my opinion.

Thoughts and prayers for the members of the Abandon Harris campaign and Muslims for Trump.

They’re coming for you. You have to move, now!

People are going to go where the people are. There’s a critical mass that has to happen for there to be enough impetus to cause a major shift. And this goes doubly so for people like artists who depend on being seen by people in order to put food on the table. I’ve seen tons of artists asking since Musk originally bought Twitter about where the hell they can go, because they’re chained to the popular social media platforms.

It’s not that I don’t believe their actions are supposed to be justified - I don’t believe that they are justifiable. They can try to justify them all they want, but that doesn’t make them just, right, or reasonable when they support a man who has spent 8 years telling everybody exactly who he is and what he intends to do. It means that they either support him in his bigotry and intention to destroy American democracy, or at the very least, they find it acceptable enough to ignore it. The calls for state sanctioned violence against minorities aren’t a bridge too far for these people. Nor are his calls for terrorism against minorities from his supporters.

I have a saying: There are conservatives, and there are Republicans, and these are not the same thing. I have watched Republicans since 9/11. I saw how the attacks on Jews tripled in the 24 hours after the towers fell, how the attacks on black people doubled, and how Muslim parents asked their kids if they wanted to change their names to something more American so they wouldn’t get attacked at school. I have tried to reason with Republicans since I was 14 and had to hide my sexuality and pretend to fit in with cis straight white people. I saw how my former coworker voted for Trump the first time and became a staunch Democrat after seeing what he did. I watched as the racist jokes kids made on 4chan became their actual beliefs. I heard over and over again on live TV Republicans complain about how they were being censored when people reacted poorly to their publicly broadcasted hatred and bigotry.

Refusing to talk to people isn’t censorship or a “death row decision,” as you put it. It’s the conclusion to decades of attempting to reason with these people. It’s accepting the fact that they have shown that when the chips are down, they won’t have your back and may even turn you over to SS themselves. This is about survival now. Cutting the people who voted the fascists in out of your life is harm reduction. When the new administration is openly calling for the genocide of people like you, wagging your finger at the people who voted him in as you’re carted off to the camps isn’t going to cut it.

There are people who can be saved, the young people especially, but Trump is a cult, and one thing about dealing with cultists is that after a certain point, 99% of them will double down rather than accept that they’re wrong. Because to admit that they’re wrong is to admit that everything they’ve done up to this point - everything that they’ve believed - wasn’t justified.

So you can go ahead and wax poetic about the injustice of not talking to the men with rifles all you want. It sure as hell looks like self-defense from the other end of the gun here.

Now you’re just justifying the actions of abusers. Your speculated scenarios are as likely to be accurate as they are to be completely off the mark. Just like your assumption that the people cutting extremists out of their lives never put any effort into changing their beliefs.

You want people to make difficult decisions because they’re the right thing to do, but you don’t care to understand how or why these type of decisions are difficult to them. Because it harms you, it harms others. Well guess what, harm comes in different shapes and forms, often unnoticed and unchallenged.

The same exact words apply to your own argument. You might as well be saying, “Abusive parents deserve to be in their grandchildrens’ lives because it’s harmful to them to not be allowed to see their grandkids.”

The hard part would be doing it in a way that pulls in the kind of people who listened to Alex Jones.

The funniest thing to do would be to turn it into either a legitimate leftist new site or a leftist themed nujob conspiracy mill (though I don’t know how that would work).

Do you not understand the concept of compounding events or something?

This isn’t coming from nowhere and it’s not the first action people are taking.

This is coming from 10-20 years of dealing with these people. The drunk uncle going on about “the darkies” every Thanksgiving since Reagan was in office. The in-laws making comments about how they respect you as a person, they just can’t support your “gay lifestyle.” The mother or father asking why you can’t just be a feminine gay man instead of trans. People who have had years of their cognitive dissonance pointed out to them as they repeatedly vote for politicians who want to hurt their friends and family.

And now, as the thugs are donning their jackboots and people are saying, “Enough is enough, you’re a danger to my life and right to freedom,” you’re wondering why the abuser doesn’t deserve to be in their victims’ lives?