FWIW, BlueSky is probably worth also maintaining a presence on. They went the decentralized route too, and It took a bit of time but the users finally managed to bully Jack into leaving the company and selling all of his ownership.
I'm mostly active here & on BlueSky.
Already every time my European friends come to visit I have to defend my decision to live here. But like wtf do I even say at this point.
I can explain that the electoral college is flawed and that every country was doing dumb shit in 2016.
But "yes, I know the country overwhelmingly voted to elect a convicted sex offender with 34 felonies as president, the new secretary of defense is most definitely a neo-Nazi, and the head of the entire federal justice system has been known to occasionally diddle kids, but America really isn't a stupid country if you just give it a chance"
Like, I'm sorry, I got nothing at this point.
I just saw an FBI agent in the wild wearing one of those jackets that says FBI in big yellow letters and realized I've never once seen one before. I was starting to think it was a Hollywood trope 😆
I'm hoping Trump wins the popular vote purely because we really really need to skip the months or years of arguing X or Y state should do a recount, the electoral college should be abolished, the election was stolen, or any other pointless straw grasping & denialism. Every minute spent on that is a minute spent not helping the people whose safety is at risk.
Calling my ISP tech support department is the bane of my existence. I don't want be all Ron Swanson "I know more than you", but I also don't have 2 hours to waste while they hold my hand and walk me through debugging a network stack they don't understand, only to conclude the problem is on their side, which I already concluded because I debugged my entire network stack before calling them
Honestly, all the election really came down to is very very bad luck. A lot of the fallout from covid only really started to take hold around early 2021 when Biden took office. So for someone who doesn't have a decent understanding of economics (which is most voters), it just looks like "things were good under Trump, things bad under Biden, we need Trump back".
Then you have the genocide in Gaza, which the democrats were going to lose a lot of voters over either way. Their choice was basically alienate pro-Israel voters who would go to Trump, or alienate anti-genocide voters who'd then sit out the election entirely (which tells you a lot about the state of US democracy when giving bombs to a country airstriking hospital, aid workers, and refugee camps full of children is considered the politically safe play 😖).
Then there were a couple of minor surprises which probably had no real effect, but are concerning, like the GenZ vote. Typically younger voters are reliably more liberal than conservative, but I think the red pill manosphere nonsense that sprung up in early 2020s poisoned a decent portion of the male GenZ/younger millennial base and handed them to Trump.
But all in all, I think most of it really just boiled down to a lot of bad shit happened which gave the lead to whoever isn't in office because they can just point at all the fire and say "are you going to do something about those fires?" without needing any sort of plan for how they'd handle anything.
I can tell I'm in a social media bubble because everyone on most of the platforms I'm on is being reasonable despite being sad/scared.
Then I go over to Threads and my feed is entirely just left wing voters beating the shit out of each other. They're going after people who voted independent, people protesting genocide, and somehow even Obama is taking strays. I want to say it's bots designed to increase division, but honestly, deep down we all know it's not.
