I ventured over to the website “disboard” to try to find more online friends that are at least slightly left of “hunting the poors for sport”
I came across “Leftist Alternative” and I’m 99% convinced this was a fed honeypot
https://disboard.org/server/1085633149540777994
I answered all of their “prerequisite/verification” questions. Mostly my answers were of the variety of “Amerikkka imperializes the planet for the 1%” and “it’s not the left vs right, it’s the 99% vs the 1%”
They gave me a LOT of push-back for not acknowledging the “genocide” in China. But it really went downhill when I said that the imperialism of Ukraine by both USA and the Russian was/is a fairly nuanced topic.
Obama Admits US Role in Ukraine Overthrow
Pro-US, Nazi-glorifying government
Ultranationalism, anti-semitism, neo-nazi pogroms, and attacks on LGBT groups.
Ultimately I ended with, “Every war is a banker’s war” and included I was against any/all imperialist movements (including Afghanistan, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Haiti, Congo, Liberia, and Sudan), but I could definitely see why NATO advancing, despite saying they wouldn’t move a single inch towards Moscow, would incite a push from Russia to get their old trade buddy back (not to mention Blackrock/JPM front-running grain futures before the invasion and then vying to steal the mineral rights away from Ukraine in exchange to build it back up)
This really set the feds off…
“OH YOU HATE JEWS DO YA?” - ‘Leftist’ Alternative
“Wait… huh?” - Me
“A ‘Bankers’ War Huh??? We could just tell you were an anti-Semite”
“Are you insinuating… that all Bankers are… jewish?” - Me
It immediately devolved into ad-hominems from the “lefties” so I left that right-wing hell-hole :(
Is Every “Leftist” Discord a Fed Honeypot?
Or are the lib 
really just that deeply ingrained at this point?
Edit: Missed an end "
Discord is a proprietary social networking site geared toward grooming children into making their social life dependent on their app. Discord has zero encryption, meaning that all your messages are WORLD-readable by anyone who gets access to the Discord servers, this includes your direct messages.
There’s is no need to make it a fed honeypot, it’s already is designed to compromise anyone who uses it. Like, everyone gets press reels of Elon Musk and Tim Cook but have you actually seen or heard from a Discord exec?
Most people use it because of the network effect (Discord is only compatible with Discord, forcing users to be trapped within its sphere) and that it is free of charge (which, of course, attracts a lot of children who are then easily indoctrinated into reactionary Discord chatrooms). There’s no “enshittification” (which is an incredibly
term that deeply unserious people use), Discord has been designed from the start to be like this.
I’m interested in your opinion about the term enshittification. It’s a Doctrowism and even though it’s a little imprecise, frequently misused/understood, a little childish, and it isn’t my first choice, it’s the term that took off. Do you know a better phrase? Not trying to put you on the spot. You always have good takes.
It’s a good term if you want to vent out your anger, but many who use the term don’t apply to already existing theory and instead use the term to smear the corporation or software which wronged them. It gives off the impression that there are “responsible” companies who distribute nonfree software and those who abuse their customers. Of course, as Marxists, we understand that software itself is capital and in a capitalist system, the owners of software will be the ruling class and their class interests will prevail. Software is an incredible tool for creating surplus value for capitalists as unlike material goods like steel or fruit, software can be morphed and changed to increasingly extract more and more profit with anti-features and malware to yield immediate results.
It’s to say that I’m wary of populist terms like “enshittification” that can obfuscate the long standing feud for free software. All proprietary software is harmful and it’s better to point out the anti-features of these programs rather than appeal to people’s intense emotions which, in my two years fighting this fight, are incredibly fleeting. Free software vs. proprietary software is always a valuable distinction to make since it orients the conversations to people’s rights rather than the grievances of customers. Hell the term “enshittifcation” has the danger of invoking a reactionary nostalgia for a gilded age that never existed.
It’s been a while since I skimmed through that Doctorow essay, but I have always thought the term, at least as originally intended, implied that enshittification was an inevitability, a direction that any and every proprietary social media platform under capitalism will tend towards over time. If so, it seems it is still mostly in line with what you’re saying, and should help make clear that the nostalgia people have for the “good old times” on a profit-driven platform is false, since the kind of degradation that “enshitification” refers to is inherently built in from the start.
Doctorow’s ideas has a lot of radlib stuff in it.
No, the platform was never good to their users because the platform was proprietary. He keeps praising the civilized “European/Western data privacy laws” but doesn’t actually confront the origin of the problem which, in its essence is nonfree software and capitalism.
Yuck.
No, the capitalism of 20 years ago is the introduction of NDAs and nonfree licenses, of large corporate interests accumulating capital and training university researchers to become worker drones, essentially robbing the academic field to be put into factories. It was always bad, especially for minorities to be on the internet where there was little to no representation as technology used to be only an upper class hobby. The beginning of the end was 20 years ago when MIT researchers saw more value in proprietary software and control rather than keeping the software free. The material analysis stretches as far as Doctorow can retrace the steps of corporate giants and not those resisting the takeover since the 80s.
Wild and wooly internet is just a libertarian nostalgic fantasy. Bullshit takeovers were happening then and are happening now.
Yuck, why are you quoting MLK here in a talk about your social media treats going bad, real radlib energy.
He mentions nothing concrete you can go and support, just explains the problem in a milquetoast fashion. No mention of the GNU Project, Fediverse, Open Source Initiative, Right to Repair, Freedesktop, Linux etc. It’s the same level of analysis as succdems going over why capitalism is broken but saying nothing of the solution except “we got to do better y’all”.
He mentions nothing about software freedom, and that’s what I take issue with. There are more people in tech (especially em_poc and queer people) than ever yet still a frightening fraction of them actually know the history of resistance. Enshittification doesn’t help build a platform, it just builds resentment, the fact that it blew up in liberal circles is just making it seem like more of a red flag.
GNU Project despite not taking a clear stance against capitalism, is still more helpful since it provides people with an alternative worldview.
I might make a more organized post about this, but that’s just my ranty response to the term enshittification being as popular as it is.
a mutual aid group I’m in just switched from signal to discord. Its so disheartening.
If you can, you should bring up possibly switching to Matrix, you can’t let Discord get away with it.
I’ll bring it up but I don’t think I have that kind of pull really, its one of those things where it’s a big restructuring effort trying to get more organized which discord is theoretically making easier, and its all completely above-board work, so nobody really has opsec on the brain. I’m guessing they discussed this at a meeting I missed or something, which would have been the time to bring it up. even with literally no organizational features signal is better because I actually check it. I get notifications for it. I’m not installing discord, so idk if I’m gonna be helping that group as much. I guess I’ll use it in the browser, maybe, but I’d really rather not
I have a small friend group and we have our own discord server to play games with each other, what alternatives do we have? I wasnt aware of discord being so bad.
I hate to be that guy but you don’t have a discord “server” that’s your own. What you have is a chatroom (within Discord api it is called a guild) that’s hosted on Discords centralized network. Discord has the right to fuck you over at any time for any reason. Nearly all ruling class owned social networks operate like this.
Most people use Discord because they enjoy the free VoIP service that Discord gave out to all users. This actually killed a lot of VoIP companies because why pay for serverspace when you can monkeywrench discord into your needs. Discord was always a predator from the get go and was enabled by people wanting free shit but not thinking about the ramifications. Couple that with longstanding world poverty and advertising to impressionable children and you can see how Discord grew into a gigantic tumor it is today. Discord never took the spotlight like Facebook and X dot com so it creeped into people’s routine unabated. It’s an antisocial media site that grabbed the most loyal audience who themselves grabbed and lured other people into it.
If you and your friends don’t want to self host a VoIP server like Mumble or find Element’s embedded Jitsi Meet voice calls too different to use then I’m not going to finger wag you or anyone else for using Discord because you like their proprietary VoIP service. But if you can live without Discord’s VoIP you should consider switching to matrix.
We only have Discord for voip, chat room and screen share, we dont know or use any other thing, and I guess my friends dont care that much about changing to something new. Is it that bad? And Im saying this by only using the program to talk to my close friend group of 5, never bothered with anything else so Im sure Im blind to the problems.
You can try out matrix. The element client is a good choice since it mimics a lot of Discord’s design. You don’t know a lot of these things until you try it out for the first time and you may be pleasantly surprised.
I will try it myself yeah, but convincing my friends is gonna be hard.