The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck

You seem to be assuming two things. First, that there is an "easy" solution to this which is available as a result of centralization, and second that there isn't a decentralized one.

The first one is pretty hard for a service which is trying to use a gamable algorithm to show you posts from total randos, regardless of centralization.

As an example of the second one, suppose that your feed shows entirely or heavily disproportionately posts/reposts from people you follow and the people they follow, and you can turn off the second one for specific people. Then if you don't follow bots, you don't see bots. Replies show up if either the reader or the original poster follow the reply poster, and by default for the poster of what it's a reply to or if they choose to make it visible to everyone who follows them.

Now bots can show up to post replies, but only one person will see them and they'll be at the end of the list and marked as someone they have no connection with. On top of that, the user's client can do any kind of algorithmic bot detection they want.

https://philipdick.com/mirror/websites/pkdweb/short_stories/...

As someone banned from Reddit, this violates TOS and (for me) resulted in a ban based on some kind of fingerprint that survives cookie wipes.

On Twitter, you can't get away from some random offensive racism, e.g. against Indian students at football games, or whatever the 2 minutes hate is ranting about on a certain day. In BlueSky, I get all signal and pretty much zero noise.

BlueSky also has far better tools for stopping dogpiling than Twitter, by stopping the quote-tweet phenomenon. All around a much much healthier place if one chooses the healthy direction.

https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app/post/3mukm26duos2c

Amazingly, the top replies to their post about targeted harassment are from accounts trying to redirect anger at several accounts that are common targets for dogpiling. It's deeply baked into the BlueSky culture and I don't know how it came to be like that.

I've tried to prune my feed to keep it out, but now the problem is that journalists I follow eventually find themselves targeted by a BlueSky dogpiling campaign and leave the platform.

EDIT: A lot of responses are trying to blame the dogpiling victims are saying the problem doesn't exist. Let me give you one recent example, where Rick Brewster made a proof of concept of Paint.NET running on Wine and got dogpiled so hard that he deleted the post and backed out: https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4phe...

Also a reminder that Mastodon isn't one place. It's a network of instances. Bluesky is one and only one.

> except they don't like the guy's policies and conduct.

That too, but his conduct rises above "policies I don't like"; he has shown direct contempt for the other branches of our government. For example, his administration has essentially dismantled or destroyed various functions in violation of the Constitution: take USAID as an example here: USAID is an agency created de jure by Congress, yet it has been de facto dissolved by the administration. We all learned, I think, in grade school, that the job of the executive is to implement the laws passed by Congress. From an article at the time about it:

> “The President does not have constitutional authority to ignore a statute that establishes a department or agency,” says Saikrishna Prakash, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

He holds the judicial branch in contempt too: quite literally any time any judge does anything he disagrees with, the judge is blasted as "left-wing radical", even and including cases where the judge was a GOP-appointee. Further examples include ignoring judicial orders and depriving people of access to the courts by physical force (see the many cases of the administration's removal of people from the country; to put it one way: "For depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury", or "The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene" — Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan & Jackson.)

The point of the protest is to prevent him from making himself a king.

> And couldn't even change the name of the art center, so not that powerful.

This is really weak cherry picking. He has successfully removed medical care from millions of Americans, started foreign wars of aggression, destabilised several countries, probably tanked US international reputation for a generation... he is incredibly powerful.

A bunch of European countries (including all of Scandinavia) are constitutional monarchies, and they don't devolve into the sort of anti-democratic behaviour we're all seeing from Trump. As a UK resident, I would prefer if the UK were a republic on general principle, but I fail to see the monarchy causing any real large-scale harm to society (individuals like Andrew notwithstanding).

The real point they should be making is "no more despots". Some despots are kings, but some are styled presidents, such as Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un.

Also, legitimately elected or appointed officials become despots all the time. Hitler had a plurality (but not outright majority) of votes in 1932. Salazar was an MP and minister of finance, and actually legitimately tried to resign from that role several times over many years before he was eventually nominated to the role of prime minister. Ferdinand Marcos won the Philippine presidential election in 1965 with some amount of intimidation, and the Philippines only formally became a military dictatorship under his rule in 1971.

In many ways, that's the scariest scenario — people who legitimately get elected to power, and then use that power to solidify their illegitimate rule.

Like first of all I would call a person who tries to pass the checks and balances of a democracy, even if they fail, the target of the ideals or “no kings”

And while we can disagree with the extent to which any one act or bribe elevates someone to dictator, and whether or not all the accusations are true, can you not understand why someone caught up in the narrative ecosystem happening over the past few years may develop the perspective that Trump is trying to consolidate power?

Also “no folks who incrementally Test the limits of power and fail” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/29/the-slopagan...

Trump acts like a king, even if he was elected. He gets tributes and requires deference, clearly visible from the foreign and corporate donations, and behavior of the Republican Party. Or take the "super intelligence" thing, him dictating what a technology shall be called, lest you become an ENEMY OF AMERICA. Or the repeated attempts to silence the media. If we consider the Kennedy Center you brought up, Trump's name was on there, then removed by court order. His response was to close it in spite. The Kennedy Center remains closed to this day, until he gets his way.

Trump has tried to violate most of the Bill of Rights. There are reasons people see every day for why NoKings sticks and resonates.

I do agree NoKings (and broadly the far left) have really bad messaging, a product of echo chambers (imo). I suspect the Democrats will learn the wrong lessons from the midterms... sigh.

Before I get hated out of existence, please note that I don't like either party or political tactics in general because they've devolved into politically commercialized populism without any empathy or critical thought. Just as an example, deportations under Trump are roughly on trend with Obama, Trump targeting activities are similar to Obama targeting conservative groups with the IRS, Obama lied in the SoTU about the gender wage gap, Obama was hard on journalists (highest prosecutions?) Like Trump has been, and Obama ignored court orders such as issuing immigration permits in violations of a order similar to Trump ignoring orders. I could sit here and hope that any of these abuses results in better oversight, but that would be naive based on the history.

Edit: if you're going to disagree, at least contribute to the discussion.

I spread the words of Michael Sandel to hundreds of left wing people, so they might come back towards the center. That they might acknowledge their complicity in creating the situation we find ourselves in. The constituents of NoKings is far more diverse than you know. Try joining us next time to see with your own eyes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp5qsEuUOWo

> making yourself feel morally superior to others

One might wonder if your comment here falls into this category.

I thought it was mostly because the IRS only takes dollars, and they have guns [metaphorically].

Although it didn't aim to replace "traditional" social media, it became enough of a threat to US homogeneity.

Even though TikTok doesn't even try to improve its messaging and friend UX etc, a lot of young people in Asia (outside China) use it as their primary platform.

In the USA, the supreme court has ruled a corporation DOES in fact have rights. Like the lawsuit of advertising medicine that a state banned-- the SC ruled that was infringing the rights of corporations to "express" their speech.

As someone from UK, I find this whole "Corporations have more rights than I do" very disturbing but thats how it is

I'd say damn near 100% of those 98% will still cite the constitution, sometimes even crying "1st amendment!" in lieu of "free speech," so I'd say your overall point is wrong. They are basically saying both at the same time, with intent, while still not understanding it.

The left suppressing lies only opens the door to the right suppressing the truth, because the right was an enemy of truth and a spreader of lies from the beginning. The answer can't be "allow the lies so the truth has a chance to survive", that's just a compromise that brings us further from the truth.

Demanding neutrality on truthfulness in mass communication, especially during extreme political turbulence, is a terrible idea.

I suspect that the argument you're referring to is more like "free speech does not imply that all deplatforming is unacceptable." Again, it is not the case that the only 2 consistent views are "all deplatforming is unacceptable" or "all deplatforming is acceptable."

The reason to not platform hate speech is the same reason you're not allowed to yell fire in a theater or bomb in an airport without their being one. Or say you're going to kill the president. Even the US has limits on what can be said, including liability laws. You can't just defame your neighbor and not face legal repercussions if they take you to court.

One can imagine this argument during the Salem Witch trials. "She's a witch" wasn't just a joke back then. It could get someone burned at the stake.

That's somewhat true currently.

If you ship mail or packages with UPS, FedEx, Etc they are allowed to open and inspect what you send. The USPS is not allowed to do that, not without a warrant. When people ship drugs via mail they use the USPS for that reason, that it's more difficult for them to obtain warrants to discover suspected drug shipments while a UPS or FedEx will happily open any package they suspect may not be legal to send.

First of all, there's a massive difference between transporting a private package from point A to point B vs hosting someone's speech on a privately owned platform and broadcasting that speech through a privately owned network, with wider consequences that do not come into play when dealing with private correspondences between parties.

Next, paying a fee to a private company to ship your package confers certain obligations about what you are entitled to, when you are utilizing a privately owned platform for free, you are not entitled to anything.

Finally, a private company is certainly within their rights to refuse to ship your package based on an any legal criteria they choose.

Popper was a serious philosopher, such a trivial and unserious engagement with the idea doesn't pass muster.

1) popper was not a communist, quite the opposite

2) I am not a communist, quite the opposite

3) it's not an unquestionable gospel, it's something to be considered and carefully see it it applies, or is valid

4) I have literally never seen another person cite the Paradox of Tolerance, something that I learned about decades ago, so imagine my surprise at your sarcastic response.

If this is such a common response in your experience, why don't you have any critique of it, other than strawmen?

Deplatforming people organizing a peaceful protest is very different. If you cannot understand how that is different, then I worry about your critical thinking skills.

they're saying to avoid the whole argument entirely by not using a platform that can deplatform at all

Most people haven’t spent any time moderating online communities, so they don’t have to test their beliefs against reality. This is fine, frankly you saved yourself being stuck in a fractal hell scape.

However holding to this idea that the “opposition” was deplatformed, is superstition.

I’ve seen communities start with 0 moderation, and become wastelands filled with hate speech, misogyny and harassment. Which then forces moderation to be introduced.

This happens so often, that this happened to the hate groups who were kicked off of Reddit.

Communities have celebrated the introduction of moderation, and celebrated the imposition of rules that mean you can’t be harassed, attacked and targeted.

Speech that is hateful towards people because of their identities is hate speech. That is the widely accepted definition. It is not even a legal designation, nor does it need to be to concretely exist.

Denying the existence of hate speech isn't logical, because there are many unambiguous examples of it, and individuals and businesses have plenty of valid reasons not to tolerate it from the company they keep.

How does that work? People post on FB or IG, AND THEN phone you / write a letter? doubtful...

You have to hide like a little mouse in the shadows. Meanwhile the cat gets to track your every move. The cat gets, not only to defend itself where ever it wants, it can say anything it wants about you without you with you having no way to defend yourself.

Can if the cat is both evil and particularly smart it will set up things like its own No Kings forums where every person is tracked and manipulators either block or allow messages based on how much they can control the audience into reaching the opposite goal they actually want.

When someone goes looking for you, who are they going to find? With the modern net, probably not who you want them to find.

Think about how long it took to get email spam under control (and even so it remains a problem). Think about the ongoing problems with spam phone calls. Now pretend you are someone with no technical background, someone who only sees the UI and does not really understand what happens behind it -- you are not seeing spam on closed systems, you are seeing spam on open systems, what are you going to choose? Also keep in mind that there are worse forms of abuse than spam.

But seriously, there's zero incentive for the folks building these clients to make them interoperable. In fact there may even be disincentive, since the more folks they have on their platform, the more valuable the platform is.

Maybe aside from the increased attack surface and trust issues...

But somewhat counterintuitively, you can do that by making their life a little harder first.

For example: leave Facebook/WhatsApp, refuse to communicate over SMS. Have good reasons for each, so you don't come off as unnecessarily difficult. Explain that Signal is far more secure and private than either and just as easy to use. Then using Signal is making it easier to communicate with you. It worked for me.

I left the whole Facebook ecosystem about 10 years ago, but never deleted my account. I left it up as a tombstone that makes it very clear I'm not there and tells people how to contact me.

There are certainly parts of my life that would be more optimized if that weren't a constraint.

Instead, go to where people all are, real life in the real world. I go out and talk to people all the time. I listen to them before telling them. I'm more interested in getting people talking than I am in changing their minds (right now) and providing them with ideas they are unlikely to hear online. I see my "sapphire gals" (retired nokingers) becoming less extreme, not repeating the shallow talking points. I hear them asking new questions.

Talking and working with others in person is 100x better.

(yes, there were "irc channels" on telext)

and even if the reach is smaller, at least it's some reach instead of no reach

There’s a reason autocrats hate protests. It’s because they’d much rather that opposition become doubtful of whether other opposition exist out there.

And the noisy guy says, "this is to keep away all the tigers and bears!" And his friend says "but there are no tigers and bears anywhere to be seen!" and he goes "See what I mean!"