When Trump won again a guy I knew on Facebook did the big announcement that he was leaving because Zuck was ring kissing a tyrant, yadda yadda yadda. He wasn’t wrong, Zuck blows where the wind takes him and the big tech leaders are generally whores for whoever they think will let them continue to make bank while setting our civilization on fire.

But I told him at the time it was a mistake. When I’d popped into Bluesky it had the same vibe as Truth Social or Parler (that other right wing social media site that the lefties got shut down via AWS), which is to say it was a purified version of political lunacy.

“The Network Effect” keeps people on platforms because their friends, social circle, neighborhood businesses, etc, are there. It’s kind of a pain in the ass to migrate, so the only people willing to migrate to a blatantly partisan platform are the blatantly—obsessively—partisan people. That they’re winding each other up and driving each other insane isn’t just predictable, it’s inevitable.

There’s no clean solution to this problem. We let people marinate their brains in Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, Keith Olbermann … whatever crap you want to stew in until your view of the world is entirely bifurcated into evil lunatics and people who agree with you about the evil lunatics. And somewhere, a small cadre of people are laughing at you all because they’re getting rich off it.