Apparently you slept through the part where mainstream social media did try to censor, ban, and deplatform that dictator’s supporters, and it backfired.

I mean, Twitter literally banned Donald Trump, and he just started his own Twitter clone. Mainstream social media banned COVID disinformation and now we have an anti-vaxxer running the US Department of Health. Probably hundreds of thousands of people got deplatformed for claiming the 2020 elections were stolen, and more people now believe Trump won in 2020 then they did in 2021.

Biden pressured big social media to censor ideas he didn’t want spreading. The ideas spread anyway. All Biden did was show he was afraid of those ideas and make some of the worst people in the world look like martyrs.

I really can’t think of a better example of how “deplatforming Nazis” doesn’t work than the last five years of American history.

Lol, yeah. If I saw an account labeled “American Nazi Party” with a blue check mark, I wouldn’t think “wow, Bluesky endorses Nazis” - I’d think “wow, this isn’t a satire account, these are actual Nazis, imma block them.”

It’s not, though. Do you think that the admins of reddthat.com endorse everything you post? Creating a public forum for people (including the representatives of organizations) to post on doesn’t imply that the forum endorses any of the content those people post on it.

Yeah, so? Verification just means they are who they say they are. It doesn’t mean Bluesky endorses their posts.

The White House has a verified Bluesky account, too. They haven’t posted anything in months, though, presumably because of all the ratio-ing.

Pixelfed was my own “gotcha” moment because I never understood Instagram in the first place, and, in my eyes, Pixelfed was no better. But if you take that route, Mastodon is no better than Twitter.

I mean, yes? That’s the point? Pixelfed is an Instagram clone, Mastodon is a Twitter clone, Lemmy is a Reddit clone, etc, etc. They are social media, not messaging apps with additional functionality. The difference isn’t how they work but who controls the data (and how enshittified the user experience is).

The author spent a lot of words discussing the, what seems to me obvious, point that you can’t guarantee any particular person sees your social media posts. And ActivityPub is a protocol for replicating the social media experience. Always has been.