The new dialectic

In the on-off saga of a bad person buying Twitter, a noted fascist mouthpiece, as of this writing it appears to be back on. If it actually happens, which it probably will, a host of bad things have been predicted: the fascist that was banned last January would be let back on, “free speech” would rule the day, many employees would quit. Fine.

In light of this, many people have begun discussing alternatives – including Mastodon, the decentralized social network for neckbeards. Some have even moved to Mastodon, except when you squint it turns out they are just cross-posting, and everyone is replying on the old thing, not on Mastodon. Mastodon is like Twitter, but I guess it’s run by non-evil people, and there’s no incentivized way for it to make money. It’s unclear how Mastodon will be able to moderate anything questionable, should it scale. Fine.

There is also-also Discord, which is Slack with bisexual lighting. Discord is unlike Mastodon in that it doesn’t follow the typical timeline models of traditional social media apps; instead, you join “servers,” follow channels within servers, and generally nobody has any idea what servers you’re on or who you’re friends with. Discord also allows its members to pay, directly, and channel funds into new, fun features for their servers. Fine.

This feels like a terribly complicated way to communicate with one another? All that matters is two things: