This podcast elaborates on that simple idea. We still have media, we don't have to wait for the leaders of the Democratic Party to tell Americans what the Repubs are doing in terms that mean something to them as people.
Saying we're losing rights, or government workers are losing their jobs, or immigrants are being deported -- these aren't as clear as a simple message that you depend on things they are terminating.
And they hired crazy people to determine whether you survive the next pandemic, and btw there's one brewing, you can see how fast by how high the prices of chicken are.
I've thought we should have a Qanon of our own, that tells the truth about what's actually happening, not in the vague bullshit terms the Pelosi's et al explain them. Their time is past, they lost the whole fucking government. If we let them continue to speak for us, a lot of us are going to be dead.
It really is that serious.
It's time to use the media we have to organize and refine the truth down to simple terms everyone can understand.
I hope you listen.
There is a transcript.
To determine, ask yourself if you could continue to use it if it was acquired by a billionaire for their own personal political use?
What would you switch to?
Would you have to give up your history and followers?
And developers, what would you do if the billionaire acquirer dropped support for the api? How expensive and time consuming would it be to convert to a different protocol? Would you even bother?
We’ve learned a lot from the billionaire acquisition of twitter. The answer to these questions made a lot of us think we’d never want to do this again. But despite all the misleading hype, we very much are repeating the mistakes.
The current owners of Bluesky would be crazy if they closed off the opportunity to get rich. But they shouldn’t be misleading users and developers into believing that it’s safe to trust this as an open platform that couldn’t be acquired and have its utility consumed the way twitter's was.
This started as a thread on Bluesky of course. :-)
PS: Spoiler -- Bluesky is, as it is currently configured, not billionaire-proof. It's going to get acquired, it probably already has, based on what they're doing. Remember, pay attention to what they do, not what they say. It's just as true in tech as it is in politics, and these days, what's the difference anyway?
PPS: If you're thinking ahh but there's AT Protocol, our ace in the hole. Please. Twitter had an API too. It didn't make a difference. And AT Proto won't either unless there are proven systems that people are actually using that peer with Bluesky's servers, so those users can't be sold to the billionaire. We're nowhere near that. No one can say with any certainty that it's even possible. At this point the continued support of the API is entirely up to the owners of Bluesky. They could change it, break developers or completely drop it and the users and developers would have no recourse.
PPPS: Can you imagine the founders of Bluesky wouldn't take $20 million each for their share?
Then I got one of the ideas out of the blue that at first didn't make sense, but then the more I thought about the better the idea seemed. It came from Mark Cuban, who liked one of my posts on Bluesky, it was about some FeedLand rivers I had produced, and then I did what I often do -- I offered to do something like that for him. For obvious reasons I don't need to go into here, you all are smart or you wouldn't be reading this. :-)
Anyway -- he said "I'd use that if it were on Bluesky."
My first thought, ridiculous -- can't be done. They have all these limits that aren't present in HTML. I don't have any idea how I could make this work. Here's a screen shot of what a river looks like in FeedLand.
But then after a few hours or days, the idea developed, as often happens, and I decided it might work and was worth a try.
So I wrote a piece of software that hooked into FeedLand's outbound news flow, and picked out stories from the right feeds, and shot them over to an account on Bluesky. Thanks to Cuban, who linked to it from his million+ follower account, it has 7.6K followers. It uses the list of feeds in my blogroll on Scripting News to feed the river. I think it's a really good pioneering effort, with quite a few followers who are active. And it's going to stay running for the indefinite future. That was in December.
Now I've gone a step further, and generalized the code so I can have N of these rivers instead of just one. And to prove it works, I now have two new rivers on Bluesky.
One more thing -- no federation here folks. It's very simple. No new formats or protocols, built entirely on the tried-and-true RSS and OPML formats for feeds and subscription lists. (And of course support for Atom and RDF too.)
I'm glad Mark Cuban asked me to try this path, it provides something I hadn't thought of. Not just inbound feeds for Bluesky, inbound rivers. All we need now is Markdown support, and then a few more things, and we'll be back to where we were in 1997. :-)
The Republican talking points make it sound like local governments that declare as sanctuary cities are weak or immoral or anti-American, but that is not what's going on. You couldn't run a city with huge crimes commited against illegals because they would be so vulnerable, and kids need education, and everyone needs health care. Yet I hear the word used all the time in public discourse, and am concerned that most people don't know what it means.
Hegseth's job is to stay out of the way while the Heritage Foundation separates the military into those who take loyalty seriously and those who are retiring.
For that job being an alcoholic is a plus. 😀
They're interviewing for who wants to be his replacement.
His job is to keep the seat warm.
It's been over 24 hours, and my viral post from yesterday is still getting lots of RTs and likes. 
Objectively, January 6, 2021 was even more of a "day which will live in infamy" than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It was more insidious because while Hawaii was an American territory, January 6 was an attack on the actual center of our government. Had the mob prevailed, the US would have been defeated, there and then.
The Capitol police were our last line of defense, they received no help from military.
The Supreme Court should count their blessings too, because their building is just behind the Capitol.
To answer Mark Cuban's question of what could we do now to make things better. 
