“Mastodon for Harris” is a Success Story for Fediverse Activism
“Mastodon for Harris” is a Success Story for Fediverse Activism
A grassroots fundraising campaign for the 2024 election is trending towards half a million dollars raised by Fediverse members.
The Mastodon For Harris campaign has raised close to $500,000 within two weeks of being live. It is probably the largest attempt for political organizing on the Fediverse, and may provide a playbook for other efforts going forward.
First time I donated this cycle. Wanted to support a good candidate and boost the Fediverse profile. At this point just seeing the logo for the site formerly known at Twitter makes me sick.
Hey, you know what?
Lemmy for Harris. Let’s do that.
I can pitch in a dollar
Harris has had some INSANE levels of support. This is historical.
I mean, I myself was so fucking depressed that it was between the two, so literally anything that the Democrats would put up other than Biden I'm automatically going to be thrilled about. I could think of a few better options, actually quite the handful of better options than Harris, but you bet your sweet ass I'm still going to vote for her and support the ever living fuck out of her cuz fuck Trump.
Maybe the Dems will finally learn that listening to their base helps
People are very justifiably terrified of Trump. And Kamala is really something new and fresh
Check out @mstdn.social, I think it's an early one. I don't know how heavy handed it is but I've not had any issues and see a variety of content.
Thanks!
I know mastodon.social is the big one.
Probably better to avoid it then
I hear good things about fosstodon.org
Even the fediverse community is now about US elections.
I'll tell you what your "fediverse" is all about: USA. And mainly Trump vs Harris.
It's like nothing else exist. fediverse my @$$.
a lot of instances are really just Redditors who refuse to use reddit. this is especially apparent with the USA defaultism. the best thing you can do is curate the feed with blocked communities and only stay in subscribed, but as we can see here it even bleeds into totally unrelated shit sometimes, so.
ikr, why do people care? it's not like us politics affects anyone outside the us. this is one country that notoriously doesn't meddle in any other country's matters one bit, and has no armed forces or even political influence outside its own borders.
I think this is a very real observation, with not much that can be done.
The best non-USA people can do is to participate and share/produce content which is not US-centric (ideally in their native language too). Unfortunately many communities, even non political ones, often still default to a US-centric perspective and culture, which makes it hard for people to participate.
It's hard to dance around it, more people are needed.
[email protected] is quite active, on top of the languages communities like [email protected] or [email protected]
!europe[email protected] comes to mind as a somewhat political community, with a non US focus. It however has a lot of Germans in it.
The US is one of the largest english speaking communities worldwide so its maybe not too wild to expect this from english subcommunities. There is a significant amount of japanese mastodon servers and german lemmy servers
Yeah, I've blocked every US-specific community I've seen on the everything feed but it keeps spilling into seemingly unrelated communities too. And it's only going to get worse.
You'll never wholly escape it without only sticking to Subscribed in my opinion. In comes something from ADHDmemes, oh look, complaint about medication accessibility, in a way specific to the United States of America's healthcare system. Any post where people might complain about a serious issue probably has someone attributing the problem or an underlying problem to some political/government thing in the USA, and complaint/miseryposts are not solely limited to USA Politics communities. If you do manage to combat it mostly by just blocks, hats off to you.
The Fediverse is a big beast with a lot of local instances that have nothing to do with US politics (I may be biased as I do help run one - see, eg, [email protected]) and the majority of topic specific communities are less US-focused. Hell, you even have [email protected]. So you can change things around by expanding and/or pruning your yiur subs.
Welcome to Enshitification
The comments on here vs the comments on the cross-post really shows the diversity of the fediverse on different instances.
I am surprised of this.
It makes total sense. If you want to find often wealthy, often progressive people, Mastodon and the even more obscure alternatives are a no-brainer. Even the poorer people on the Fediverse are often left-leaning (by American standards at least) so just giving the place attention will already spread a good chunk of goodwill.
I suppose Biden is on Threads, but not everyone can interact with that part of the Fediverse because of defederation, so using Mastodon as a jump-off point makes sense.
I don't really get the whole American election cycle, I have no idea what all of those collected millions across different platforms can possibly be spent on in a race between "some woman" and "elite rapist convicted for fraud". Maybe the state of the country is even worse than the news indicates, but it seems to me that you shouldn't need to collect more than gas money to beat Trump…
So did Harris' campaign open a mastadon account (this shouldn't be all that difficult or costly) following this initiative?
I am not the from the US, just curious. More official government accounts on Mastadon is good thing.
I did recently notice that I could follow some people on Threads on one of my Mastadon account, that's a good thing too.
Good! Maybe I will try this for the Jill Stein campaign then!
Millionaires and politicians simping for money on Mastodon, while otherwise people who are actually disabled, homeless or in need struggle to even get their posts begging for contributions seen?
Wow, didn't expect that of all thing that would enshittify the Fediverse, it would be a politician going for the left.
That's not really enshittification, is it?
I was under the impression that Cory Doctorow's definition was largely based on how social media platforms entice people with "free" offerings, then gradually tighten the screws over time to make service worse. This usually happens when a platform becomes the dominant player.
Eh, language evolves, terms that follow normal grammar constructions eventually are expanded beyond their niches (see: "forbade" and all those verbs that start with "for"; as well as "embiggen" etc).
"Enshittify" is literally just "make something shittier" ("en-" + "shit" + "-fy"). Sure it was coined for the idiosyncracies of this absurd timeline, and we are all glad for that -- but really it's just a correct word that has always existed it just went unused.
Now, if you want to pedant, sure let's go that way: Mozilla is also a platform that "entices people with a free offering" (Firefox), then "gradually tightens" (or, really, loosens) the screws over time "to make that service worse" (Pocket, Robot, post-Auralis UI, AIs, etc). This "usually happens when a platform becomes the dominant player" (in this case, basically the only big Gecko browser).