Solarbird is Everywhere

Did you know that Mastodon and BlueSky users can follow each other, using something called a "bridge"?

I wrote up how up above, at the link.

I'm talking about it here because it looks like Fuckerberg's decision to repeat Musk's successful Twitter experiment with Facebook, Insta, and Threads is going well enough before it even really starts that he's mad about it.

Good.

(If you missed it, Suckerberg basically carved LGBT people and women out of anti-harassment rules, giving the green light for mass abuse campaigns, and said no more fact checking, disinformation is fine, we'll use X's "community notes" system instead. The abuse bot armies will spin up _so fast_, holy shit. But, well, he's gone in on MAGA, so what do you expect?)

Anyway, if you're leaving Facebook or Insta or Threads for Mastodon or BlueSky, and so are your friends, you might want to know that you don't have to lose contact with people who go to the other one. You can just turn on the bridge and then follow each other just the same. It's pretty dang neat, really.

Now that there is an actual mass X-odus happening – and it is real and it is happening this time – I’m telling people: Right now, anything is better than X. Anything. I’m happy you’re finally leaving, over two years after I said it was time to go.

But I also say that I wish people were going to Mastodon, or some other Federation/ActivityPub social media system, and I ask them to turn on the BridgyFed gateway, to keep communications open with those of us in the Federation. I have other reasons for that too, which I may get into later, but that’s the reason I give. All of them are equally sincere.

I did that enough times – always friendly, always encouraging, but consistently and persistently, giving my little speech – and someone finally asked me why. So I told them: Because it can all be so much better than this.

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I’m seeing a lot of people wondering how Elon knew.

Hours before the election was over, Musk was out there on X saying “Men are voting in record numbers” and that he and Trump were going to win because of it.

And I’m seeing people wonder how he knew. Saying it was because he saw some pictures of men in queues at voting site. Stuff like that. And I’m like…

People. For fuck’s sake. I’ve been telling you for years. He knew because they told him.

X is a fascist propaganda and disinformation fountain. But before that, it was also an information collector, and very much still is. Even moreso, now. X – and therefore, Elon – knows your politics real well.

But that’s only part of it.

The X app, like the Twitter app before it, requests location information. Almost everyone who puts it on their phone – their smartphone, with GPS – says sure, clicking through permissions if it’s even asked asked about at all. Sure. Why not.

This mean he knows where you are every minute of every day – at least whenever you have your phone with you – and that includes when you go to a polling place to vote.

Musk knew his fashpilled brosphere was turning out because they all told him where they were by having X on their phones.

Even more than that, if you’ve got X on your phone, and your state does in-person voting, he knows whether you have voted yet, because he knows if you have been to a polling station.

Those locations are public information, and polling results at those stations help confirm or deny X’s knowledge of your politics.

If you haven’t, and your politics are in line with his, I’m sure his algorithm will encourage you to get out there and vote. If you haven’t, and your politics are not in line with his, I’m sure it will discourage or distract you just as quickly.

That’s what his pet AI “Grok” is for, really.

Well, one of the things. That’s why he wants to unleash it on all your data, for “training.” What he’s training it for is to know your individual politics. If you still have an account on November 15th, that’s what’ll happen. He’ll set it off to chew through all your data, so it can encourage – or discourage – you to vote… properly.

According to the Law and Politics of Elon Musk.

And that’s what X is for.

This election showed the billionaires that this will work. I wouldn’t expect Bluesky to remain independent for all that long; at some point in the not too distant future, I’d expect some similarly-minded billionaire to buy it, too, and do the same thing as Elon.

To stop that, Elon’s experiment needed to fail. At the core of everything else, as I have said too goddamn many times to count, that is why Elon’s experiment needed to fail. Because if it doesn’t, it will be repeated.

People did not – adequately – flee X.

The experiment has succeeded.

It will now be run again.