I’ve been mulling over Janus Rose’s recent 404 Media article, “You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism.”. In many ways, she’s not wrong. But once again people are ignoring an entirely other way of doing social media that can, in fact, fight fascism.

. . .

What is to be done? Well, Rose argues that there is no antidote to Trumpian poison to be found in merely taking to social media and posting about his (or Elon Musk’s, or Pete Hesgeth’s, or any other Trumpist’s) bizarre or cruel statements. “If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president,” she writes, “it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want.”

. . .

Can folks doomscroll on the fediverse? Yes. Can folks post on the fediverse? Yes. Might they post about the latest outrage of Trump? Yes, definitely.

Does that mean they are failing to fight incipient fascism? No.

In fact, I argue that the act of running, moderating, and participating in federated social media is precisely the sort of organizing that Rose calls for. It’s just taking place in a media environment, rather than, say, in an NGO’s offices in a city.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago

Sure, moderating and creating places like the fediverse are good and useful. But 99% of the time people spend on the fediverse isn't doing that

I feel like this article misses the essence of the original. It's a strawman. Yes, being on the fediverse is better than being on twitter/facebook whatever corpo media. But it is equally susceptible to just endless scrolling without any action

Many Twitter refugees made a good choice in migrating from Musk’s X to Bluesky, carving out a new online space that is inhospitable to bigoted debate bros and time-wasting trolls. But in their enemies’ absence, many of these Left-leaning posters have just reverted to dunking on each other, preferring the catharsis of sectarian conflict over the hard work of organizing.

Yeah I've tried bluesky, this is entirely accurate. 90% of US political content on bluesky is basically a combination of r/whitepeopletwitter and r/clevercomebacks. Same people too, that reddit loves