I’m not paranoid, but I did notice that just as I was getting a surge of Bluesky followers coming over from Twitter, my database here at Progress Pond got badly corrupted leading to several days of downtime. It didn’t help that my son had a two-day soccer tournament in Lancaster County this weekend that made it difficult for me to address the problem. In the end, we had to use a backup of the database, which probably erased some people’s recent comments. I apologize for that, but nothing else worked to fix the problem. I still don’t know what caused the crash, so it’s possible it will recur.
In the meantime, I encourage you to try Bluesky for your social media needs. I have a couple of Starter Packs you can use. One includes people who were prominent parts of the progressive blogosphere and the other is made up of folks who were part of the early days of the Philadelphia chapter of Drinking Liberally. Unsurprisingly, if you know your history, there is some overlap.
The main advantage of Blue Sky over X/Twitter is that it doesn’t have an algorithm that prevents you from actually seeing posts from people you follow. That’s a big problem on Twitter since Elon Musk took over. It works both ways, too. Only a tiny percentage of my followers on Twitter will ever see my tweets. Meanwhile, right-wing content producers are boosted by the algorithm. At Blue Sky I get much more engagement even with a fraction of the followers, and it’s not filled with hate and propaganda, so that’s nice, too.
I’m hoping this will help Brendan and me overcome the problem we’ve faced promoting our podcast. We’ve had a bit of a fallen tree in the forest problem thanks to changes in how both X/Twitter and Facebook treat posts with outside links, as well as Musk’s war on the left-wing influencers. I think at Blue Sky, we have a real chance to get some listeners, and maybe some financial supporters as well. The best way to help us there is to like and subscribe to our podcast, and to head over to Patreon and lend us a hand.
Here is a gift link to Julia Angwin’s New York Times article on how “the red tide that swept across the nation in our recent election marked many things. One of them was a right-wing triumph over social media.” Here’s a taste:
Under heavy pressure from the right, and with the help of X owner Elon Musk, the leading tech platforms opened the floodgates for propaganda to spread unchecked. The result was a flood of lies and distortions flowing through our social media feeds. That led to possibly the most misinformed electorate we’ve ever seen.
Many voters headed to the polls convinced that border crossings are higher than ever before (they are not), violent crime rates are rising (untrue) and inflation is soaring (ditto). We will never know how much this garbage may have swayed voters, but we do know it influenced one side significantly: conservatives.
Combine this lowering of guardrails with the tech chief executives’ obsequious public congratulations to President-elect Donald Trump after his resounding win, and it’s hard not to see this striking turnaround in political terms. “In Trump, Silicon Valley got what it wanted: a president that will kneecap antitrust efforts, embrace deregulation and defang labor laws,” the journalist Brian Merchant wrote in his newsletter, Blood in the Machine.
And with Mr. Trump soon in office, the landscape may get worse before it gets better. Brendan Carr, tapped by the incoming president to be the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, posted on X after securing the nomination a call to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.”
As Nate Cohn details in the New York Times, this all helped move most demographics against the Democrats and the left, particularly among the working class of all races. If you’re a regular reader here, you know I have been warning of this since I did my first autopsy of the 2016 election: How to Avoid the Political Southification of the North. Perhaps you should revisit my June 2017 feature article in the Washington Monthly: How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values. I even harped on the risk in my autopsy of Joe Biden’s successful 2020 campaign. My concern all along was that an urban/suburban alliance is unstable and prey to right-wing populism. Right-wing populism is fascist in nature and does not respect institutions, and if it becomes ascendant, true representative government can crumble, along with people’s rights and freedoms. You can’t, therefore, write-off rural and small-town America or lose the support of people who don’t have college degrees, because you will lose more than an election. You will lose your country.
That’s where we are now. And no one is coming to save us except us. That’s why you really need to support left-wing influencers in any way that you can. If not me, then a bunch of other people. We need to support and amplify each other, and that is really what Bluesky is shaping into if it’s still in nascent form.
Anyway, sorry about the server. I’m back now, and I hope I’m back for good.