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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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to the point that Twitter is a mostly worthless husk with a domain name and a low-moat technical product.

Twitter is already a low-moat product, network effects are what keep competitors from replacing it. If the left can come up with a left-wing version of Gab/Truth Social/whatever and actually get people to use it (unlike the right-wing examples I just gave) then Twitter might be in trouble. Otherwise I think it's going to stick around.

If the left can come up with a left-wing version of Gab/Truth Social/whatever

It's probably worth noting that most of them have attempted to migrate to literally that exact thing (various Mastodon instances). I don't think they'll be particularly successful for the same reason that Gab/TS/etc. haven't been successful: there's simply no value-add in reactionary construction. They don't do anything better than Twitter does anyway.

Which is the same problem this place has, but even worse, since at least you can find this place with a Google search- you can't even do that with Mastodon instances at all. Lefty Mastodon even has the purity spiral thing built in because of how vulnerable users are to admin catfights and a de facto globally-enforced blocklist, where Twitter curbed most of the excesses of that approach- so people can't expect the stability they need to build anything good on top.

The future is not federation, it's confederation, and by its inherently freeing nature it thus can neither come from Left nor Right.