Trump is a lapdog to American oligarchs first and foremost. His relationship with putin is strained, otherwise he could easily stop supporting Ukraine, because that is the first and foremost goal for putin at the moment. As always, look at the financial decisions to see through the noise.

Even if putin had kompromat on trump, it matters less and less with each passing day. It has been known for a few years, almost for certain, that trump raped kids, and yet he has been reelected and even won the popular vote as an insult to injury. No amount of kompromat will make his base change their mind as long as there is a steady stream of fascist propaganda reaching their ears, only total economic failure will. This is all made possible by huge donations and support from billionaires, putin is irrelevant here.

It’s you who is falling for the ruling class propaganda. They are making sure you have an external enemy to blame instead of them. Putin can go eat shit and die in a prison cell next to trump, but he’s not the tail wagging this particular dog.

I do see your point and I’ll actually upvote you here. But I do think there’s a meaningful difference.

Software is just an idea written down rigorously. Various societies created various conventions and social contracts to control dissemination and usage of ideas, both in their pure and written down forms. Capitalist societies generally defer to the author of the idea for how they want it handled (at least for the first few decades), so that the author can earn some money from it (of course, even ideas are monetized under capitalism) - this is patent and copyright law.

The free software movement is just a novel application of the copyright law. By sharing ideas freely but with a license that forces everyone using the idea to share their derivative ideas freely as well, it is attempting to destroy the spirit of copyright law by using the letter of copyright law.

With all this in mind, let’s examine what it would mean to add the “don’t be evil” clause to an otherwise FOSS license.

1. In ideal circumstances, a society’s system of laws and social norms should incorporate “don’t be evil” in it already. Hate speech and nazism should be prohibited and punished, so the clause would be superfluous.
2. In “ordinary circumstances” of neoliberal capitalism, there are agencies that will be acting in bad faith but will stand above any laws, be it geneva conventions, hate speech laws or (boring) copyright law. You won’t be able to enforce a “don’t be evil” clause against the CIA or ICE or the Rockefeller. They can just take your software and use it, so the clause would be of little use typically. This is partially applicable to our current situation.
3. In extraordinary circumstances, such as capitalism in advanced decay a.k.a fascism, the law will be ignored by most evil actors anyways. Law is just a social contract and fascism is deliberately breaking all social contracts. Nobody will enforce copyright law in favor of an individual FOSS developer, especially against someone who’s on the side of the regime. So the clause is completely useless. This is also applicable to our situation.

There is some edge-cases in the middle where a “don’t be evil” clause might make a bit of sense. If the contract law (which includes copyright law) is still well-respected, but the social contract itself is falling apart around it, it might be used to prevent some nazis somewhere from using your software for a short while, but that situation is always unstable and does not last. In any case nazis are known for ignoring all social contracts, including court orders, so even this is questionable.

There are also downsides in any “don’t be evil” clause, because it requires you to rigorously define what you mean by “evil”. This is actually really hard to do well without relying on existing laws (which ruins the point), and will usually either leave nazis leeway to get away with using it, or harm legitimate users, or both - especially because legitimate users are less likely to try pushing the boundaries.

This is explicitly different from what Bluesky is doing. They are hosting known nazis. Nothing is stopping them from banning ICE and making it into a point of pride, it is really easy. There is no downside, no legitimate user hurt. It’s as easy of a decision as one can make.

To reiterate,

So the mastodon service supports Nazis.

Mastodon-the-service doesn’t really exist (unless you count mastodon.social). But the fediverse in general is not supporting nazis. Nazis are banned and defederated.

Mastodon-the-software may “support” nazis in the same way as the idea of a printing press (from your other comment) supported nazis.

They’re providing software to Nazis, and I don’t really see how that makes them better than providing a place to post.

Bluesky is categorically worse because it doesn’t have the “don’t be evil” clause in the software licenses either, and it is hosting nazis directly on the platform they run.

I’m quite interested whether Russia will join. On one hand Russia and US are geopolitical rivals, and trump is still helping Ukraine to some degree. On the other hand putin has been trying to suck up to trump at multiple occasions - the last one being that rare earth proposal - and is trying hard to be seen as wanting “peace”.

A cool $1b bribe might warm the relationship significantly, hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if the US starts selling weapons to Russia at that point.

I guess it also depends on how much EU countries are willing to bend over, if they go all in on it that can scare putin off for a bit.

I’m not sure it’s targeted at anyone “important” (what a classist term!). It is just analyzing the situation and predicting what happens next, for you and I to be prepared. It also hastens the end of the bubble ever so slightly, which is good - the sooner this poison-laced bandaid is ripped off the world’s economy, the faster we can start to rebuild something more meaningful, but now with new productivity tools by our side.

I don’t think he’s necessarily a genius, but he is a force for good and a great writer. We do need someone to keep stating the truth, keep saying what’s right and what’s wrong, this is literally how we win the information war currently waged against us.

It’s the same with the genocide experts calling out genocide, or the eco-activists calling out climate change. It might be obvious common sense to you, but it might not be to other people, and this is precisely why it needs to be shouted from every rooftop we have available.

Oh, and also, if you actually read his works he clearly does more than just state the obvious and coin new terms (even though both of those are important too). He is deeply and intimately familiar with the technical and social structures of the modern internet, his analysis of various phenomena and trends is usually on-point and has some predictive power (it is more dialectical-materialist than most tech journalism out there). Most importantly he offers solutions to the issues facing us, and practices what he preaches too.

It didn’t last because the will of bureaucracy was placed before the will of the people, it was a long decline of democratic rights of the working class started under Stalin and continued by all following leaders. It was not due to socialism per se, more due to the specifics of CPSU politics. China seems to have figured out a better way to do democratic dictatorship of proletariat and is successfully combining aspects of capitalism and socialism, to both make the country appealing to capitalist investors and also build up a socialist economy to bring the living standards up. It’s not perfect (and is definitely not “the end of history” by any means), but it is doing fine as an interim solution.

A soviet era russian also had access to free healthcare, free childcare, free higher education, cheap (sometimes free) housing, excellent (for the time) public transit, and a safety net for unemployment or old age. Oh and there was ample opportunities to build community ties so that if something did go horribly wrong and you needed that help. Capitalism in decline will give you none of that.

However, if each of the 75019230 people who voted for Kamala would instead start shitting on the porches of the 25% (~90 million people), y’all will be done in less than two days. Such is the power of organizing!

Basically The Onion writers rn

I’m not defending anyone. I am just looking at a stated claim (Bluesky is as bad as Twitter because they verified ICE) and evaluating if it has merits.

I don’t think that’s the claim, at least that’s not the way I’m reading it.

Here is the quote we are discussing:

Wow. Bluesky has just welcomed and verified ICE.

For anyone still thinking Bsky is a real alternative to Twitter: No, it’s not.

Mastodon is. Bsky is just X at its infancy.

Let me spell it out the way I understand it:

Bluesky is knowingly hosting nazis. The verification here just displays the mens rea: rather than them just not noticing the account, they know about it and still haven’t banned it.

Bluesky is not as bad as Twitter right now. However, this is the quintessential beginning of a Nazi bar, which means it will eventually become as bad as Twitter.

The Fediverse is not knowingly hosting nazis. Instances ban nazi accounts, and those that don’t are considered nazi instances and are quickly defederated by 99% of other instances. This is the minimum that I expect of Bluesky too, since it’s a centralized platform and should be better at moderation.

As long as I am reasonably in control of the information that I can access, I see no point in complaining about it.

I think there is a significant problem in platforming nazis. It gives this vile ideology a voice and a means to spread. Especially given the state of media literacy and critical thinking in the West, a lot of people don’t know how to control which information they see, and makes them susceptible to this manipulation. Fascism is rising through social media misinfo right now, as we discuss this, so it is very important to complain about it as loud as possible.

I wouldn’t call it “endorsing”, but I would call it “platforming”. blahaj.zone is platforming you, lemmy.ml is platforming me, bluesky is platforming nazis.

They have already posted a job ad to join a violent fascist paramilitary in their profile.

Good to know there’s a second full-network relay (assuming this is what it is). Last time I checked all third-party relays only indexed some sections of the network, so my knowledge was outdated.

Conceptually relays are the indexers of the network, you can view individual PDSes without them, but you won’t get cross-PDS discovery; this is because PDSes don’t actually federate with each other.

This means that in practice, relays define what it means to be “on bluesky”. If you are banned on all relays, your PDS becomes just a weird standalone microblog.

This is different from the fediverse, where all instances federate with each other by default and relays just enhance discoverability and connectivity, rather than being the only way to do it.

And in any case this is all a bit academic, bluesky are hosting nazis on their own PDS, bsky.social.

What I am “OK with” has no impact whatsoever in “what actually gets to happen”. I rather not waste my energy on the things that I can not control.

You are in control of which social media you use, and even more so in control about which companies you choose to support or defend. You are currently spending your energy defending a company that is hosting a de-facto nazi account on their servers.

Let me rephrase the question. If a newspaper you enjoy reading started publishing a column from Gestapo, what would you do? Would you boycott and complain? Would you just complain and keep buying it? Or would you keep buying it and defend their actions by “well I can just skip that page with the nazi propaganda on it”?

It would. They would just do it from unverified accounts.

Well, yeah, but that would take effort in creating&advertising new accounts. Why make their nazi jobs easier?

Worse still, they would be able to post it and completely deny it if confronted about it.

There is literally nothing stopping them from doing it now. Having a verified account does not impede their ability to create fake unverified accounts in any way.

Spammers also get to send millions of messages every day for “free”, but we mostly ignore it because we are able to filter them out. Sure, it would be great to completely get rid of spam and the phishing industry… but there is no way to completely get rid of them that does not involve increasing the surveillance aparattus and given more power to a centralized enforcer, so if I have to choose between spammers and corporate-controlled communicatioins, I will take the spammers any day.

I would agree with this (except bluesky is also corporate-controlled). There is no way to completely cut out spam, including nazi spam.

But in this case someone from Bluesky looked at this account which self-identifies as a nazi organization, verified that it belongs to a nazi organization, and hasn’t banned it. It is clearly different.

Truth Social is running Mastodon under the hood. But nobody considers it a part of the fediverse, because even if it had federation turned on it would instantly be defederated by 99% of instances.

I’m sure there are nazi lemmy instances out there, but they are all defederated from the lemmyverse.

This is the correct approach, decentralized platforms are somehow doing a better job at this then the de-facto centralized bsky.

No, I don’t expect them to ban anyone from the government.

So, you would be OK with a newspaper accepting ads and publishing an opinion column from Gestapo or SS? They were official government organizations after all.

And, no, I don’t think it would be wise to do it: verifying the account does not mean they are supporting it, it just means they are making sure that whatever crap ICE is saying can not go around without accountability.

You are once again presenting a false dichotomy. The choice is not only between “verify” and “not verify”, there is also the option to “ban”. Banning ICE would not let them post Nazi propaganda on their platform at all.

That’s how decentralized systems work. Bluesky does not control who I get to see.

1. Bluesky is de-facto centralized, they operate the only full-network indexer, they get to control what accounts can post to all frontends
2. They are hosting the ICE account on their own server and domain (bsky.social), and make it available through their own frontend (bsky.app). They definitely can control that, even if there were other indexers available

There is no excuse for bluesky to be hosting nazis. They have the choice, they are making that choice, fuck em.

ICE or any other institution can not buy its way into manufacturing propaganda.

They literally can. Except in this case they didn’t even have to pay, the corporate overlords of bluesky will let them post propaganda for free.

Nazis are quite good at bending or evading rules to further their agenda. They will push the boundaries of what’s acceptable by using creative allegories or dogwhistles. Moderators are supposed to moderate assuming goodwill from participants, this should not be the case here because ICE is not operating in good faith; a good mod will know to just ban self-identified nazis straight away. Even if the mods are hesitant to ban without any activity, me thinks a job ad to join the modern Gestapo (which is already in ICE’s profile) should be grounds for a ban.

Bsky is actually quite centralized. Bluesky the company owns the only full-network indexer (I think they call it a “relay” or something), which collects posts from all other servers and allows those posts to be rendered by various apps (e.g. bsky.app, but all other frontends use the same indexer). They could just ban them at indexer level.

But even that is moot, because they are letting them host their account on a server Bluesky the company owns, bsky.social.

It is a lot better. If you let Nazis join your platform, your platform is now a Nazi bar. Ban them, don’t let them spread their propaganda.

Do you expect bsky to ban ICE? They already have a job posting to join the Gestapo in their profile, is that not enough?

Someone at bsky verification team looked at this, and instead of flagging the account to be reviewed and removed, they pressed the “verify” button. If you give them the benefit of doubt, this was a mistake from someone on the verification team, but realistically speaking a corporate platform turning into a Nazi bar is quite natural nowadays.