Bobby Brown @bobbyd0g@hellsite.net

LB: I swear I was just thinking about and resisted posting just the other day about buyouts. Individuals are easy to buy. SMALL INSTANCES, friends. It's the only way.

I'm so mad, I just realized I returned the wrong hoodie to Costco yesterday -- my favorite hoodie -- and Uniqlo hasn't made them again in years!

For fuck's sake!

If you're exhausted **from** relentlessly examining yourself, let's talk sometime.

I got absolutely zero time to spare on weak people. And I certainly don't mean people exhausted by dispensing the strength life demands from them. I mean constitutionally weak people who are incapable of examining themselves.

Whenever the dummy left makes you feel hopeless, always keep a couple of chuddy spaces in your chat client so you can take five, go part that curtain, and **shield your fuvking eyes at the stupidity**

Mastodon sure feels like the dog catching the car right about now. Democratizing real power in a hurry is always fucking ugly.

Beginning this thread, I struggled as I often do with where to start, and fell more than a bit short here. I should expand on why this followed from my advocacy for sensible trustful systems as a both dialectical and striving pursuit. I am neither for eliminating, nor maximizing, trust in any given system, but putting it where it works best to render sustainable patterns of humanist outcomes. Hopefully I'll have more time to write later today.

Like, it's obvious that figures like Q/uanta Boy and initiatives like Bluesky are pushing systems designed to destroy community moderation power in response to its lamentable excesses (in favor of chaos and authority, respectively), and they take advantage of a strong and abiding individualism (read: competitive ideology, essentially, capitalism) that even few committed anarchists I know have openly endeavored or transparently sought to eradicate from their rhetoric, analyses, or attitudes.

Small communities take advantage of, and encourage to build, the sort of real material (or at least impactfully social) connection that improves human behavior, and maximize our responsibility for each other, instead of diffusing or delegating that responsibility so deeply that anyone can use their common sense to dismiss any individual's relation to it. It is easy to reject no-trust concepts the right wing proposes because they resemble ill-fated crypto asset marketing, but we must go farther.

To clarify the very beginning of the thread, I should say that we need to build systems that support reasonable degrees of trust. It is meaningless to "trust" a centralized moderation team with anything more than a reactive relationship with any given user on a huge platform they're tasked with managing, just like it is meaningless to "trust" a no-[human-]trust system to arbitrate every individual user's needs adequately to a cohesive whole. *Small* communities account for most such problems.