I think the saddest acceptance I have over what happened this week is the knowledge that the social media landscape is going to be a cratered wasteland for the next few years.
A repeat of the sort of upheaval we went through online in 2016 is not something I'm interested in reliving either on Mastodon or any other site or service.
@flargh I may be wrong. I don’t think that will happen here. I do think though that social media will continue to become just as siloed and fractured by interests as the media has become. To a large extent that has already been achieved.
I guess the question for Mastodon, Bluesky, and who knows what else may or may not surface, is how well the defenses will be against the army of bots that just stopped on Twitter the moment the election was called. They will seek and attempt to destroy again.
@WarnerCrocker For me at least, the past few weeks on the Fedi have been exhausting, too much friendly fire from well-meaning, earnest people who think yelling into the void makes a difference.
@flargh I get that and feel it too. Done a bit of it myself. My hunch is it’s a quest for solidarity, now solace, and eventually solutions. Being a theatre geek, I see it often as performance art, occasinally as bursts of small plays. Either way, when the houselights go on, everyone goes home.