Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. … But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company.”

This is the same problem that all these “free speech platforms” keep running into. Some people will abuse free speech - if nothing else, I think everyone can agree spam is a type of abusive speech. But the difference between abusive speech and ordinary speech isn’t a sharp line, and the definitions of “abuse” will vary. So there needs to be some mechanism or rules for deciding what that line is. But all the people that create these platforms instead wanna pretend that line doesn’t exist, so they don’t create a means of determining it. So then “abuse” becomes whatever the users demand and/or the decisionmakers decide it is. Which is exactly the same as having no free speech to begin with.

If you assume:

1. X is a bad thing (either because it promotes bad ideas, or because it crowds out better platforms, or some other reason)
2. The more users and functionality X has, the more powerful it will be.

Then removing functionality from X is a good thing.

Voting for the lesser of two evils has been the strategy since day 1. In 1860 both Lincoln and his opponent Douglas wanted to keep slavery (Lincoln only wanted to limit its spread), and worse, only some Americans were allowed to vote. Forget the far left, a modern moderate might refuse to vote at all in that election - why vote for Lincoln if you’re voting for someone who wants to keep something as abhorrent as slavery?

Yet voting for Lincoln nevertheless did move the needle against slavery and eventually led to its abolition. And voting for people we’d almost certainly see today as the lesser evil eventually would lead also to improvements in worker rights, universal suffrage, social security and medicare, ending segregation, gay rights, and the right to abortion - before refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils took that away.

It’s your right not to vote. But what happens - or doesn’t - is your responsibility.

Lesser of two evils isn’t cutting it, they’re both leading us to the same place

Then you’d concede that if they are leading us to different places, lesser of two evils does cut it.

You’re playing chess. You have a choice - lose a pawn, or you can keep the pawn and the next move you’ll lose by checkmate. I dunno about you, but I’m saying goodbye to that pawn.

That’s the choice, except instead of keeping the pawn you lose it anyway because Trump likes Israel even more. Biden wins, there will be a different Democratic nominee in 2028. And if you want it to be someone more in line with your thinking than Biden, well you know what you gotta do in 2028.

But if Trump wins, he’s gonna do everything in his power to make sure the choice in 2028 is his and not yours. Not stopping him is game over.