Until we have a voting system where 3rd parties are viable (for example. Ranked Choice Voting, Star Voting, Approval Voting, etc.), we absolutely do not benefit in any way for the existence of more parties.

Whether intentional or not, America today is a two-party system by design. If you want more choices beyond the Democrats and Republicans, you need to help us enact voting system reforms which are necessary to allow 3rd parties to exist legitimately. We aren’t joking when we say that voting 3rd party is throwing your vote away; it very much is.

Try out a mesh network VPN like tailscale (others are available, but i haven’t tried them).

Tailscale is basically just a simple but powerful wireguard manager that does all of the work of setting up a mesh network for you, and it works amazingly well in my experience. The free account is good for I think 3 users and 100 devices on a network and has been the perfect thing to expose my home server to my various devices no matter where I am.

I like it so much after having used it for the last few months that I just spent way too much money upgrading my server… but that’s another thing entirely. lol

Dude, he literally did BOTH of those thing 2 years ago… 🤦

The DEA was supposed to have rescheduled by now, but of course decided to slow-roll it until after the election. Now either Trump will cancel the rescheduling or take credit for it, both of which are fucking stupid ways for this to end.

Not to rub it in, but as someone who lives in a state where it has been legal for about 10 years and who also works from home, my experience couldn’t be more different than yours.

I guess it just comes down to electing better people to represent your state, or moving.

They aren’t really the same answer.

People suggest that Mastodon is too complicated for the average knuckle-dragging moron to use (and it might be, but frankly I consider that a pro, not a con) because it has “servers”, as if the entire point of the internet wasn’t to have a global network of communication across a multitude of clients and servers. Do these same people think the concept of websites and email are also too complex for the regular person? Maybe… But again, if the regular person is that fucking dumb do we really want have them in our community at all?

What’s more, BlueSky is supposedly federated (or “will be”™), and as such it’ll have to deal with all of the same challenges around federation that Mastodon deals with, and people are kidding themselves if they think otherwise.

Otherwise I agree with your last sentence. Social media is about money and fame, first and foremost. The average person will always go where the most money and fame are concentrated.

You want the bullshit “Mastodon is too complicated and hard to use!” answer or the real answer?

BlueSky has rich people behind it.