And there's really two kinds of people to fleece with this one scheme: 1) people who want to leave MAGA but like most MAGA are addicted to buying worthless trash, and 2) people who are desperately trying to get their family out of MAGA so they send them this link to convince them. The human desire for catharsis is strong and therefore exploitable.
I want to give the BOTD, I read some of the testimonials and it's a mixed bag. Some people have genuinely improved and changed their politics, some are still damaged dipshits who are just more self-aware now.
But it's a storefront. And not even a good one. It's undermining their own cause.
The first thing you notice when visiting the site is a fucking shopping cart icon. Not a great sign if we're looking at this like it's a serious support site for people trying to tackle their own issues. It's like selling collectible shot glasses at alcoholics anonymous.
I mean I guess you got to respect the hustle... MAGA is chock full of the easiest to fleece people in the world, and you've got a website to run. You're not here to help them with their shopping addiction that's for sure!
Even Chinese SA's have access to VPN's, proxies, etc. It's not like they would tie their own hands behind their backs to spread the good word, ya know?
Russia only needed a small number of inroads to influence the 2016 US election, and now? Pff, they hardly need to do anything, we're completely self-sufficient in propagandizing ourselves. It's entirely possible China's already created their own army of Overseas Useful Idiots.
ML stands for Marxist-Leninist, that's more or less the Tell. They're not merely socialist, but authoritarian. Like MAGA, they treat dissent as hostile.
The way I understand the ActivityPyb protocol, it is Publisher/Subscriber paradigm. That means when you federate with another instance, you receive (Subscribe to) the things they Publish, and they subscribe to the things Hexbear publishes. So they don't "reblog" Hexbear just because they receive Hexbear content. Their users would have to deliberately reshare the content in some way (on Kbin/Mbin, this is done by Boosting, on Mastodon it's Resharing, etc etc).
Just checked my blocklist to remind myself and... yep. Yeah that's a big blindspot for us, the pruning and curating of the space has to be done by hand. New users, and especially younger users, are often used to that being done for them by the platform itself.
The fediverse is like a massive yet untamed garden filled with various species, some beautiful, many poisonous. They don't see gloves and shears and see opportunity, they see a chore.
Everything you said was spot on, and all of it is by design. The engineers and operators of the fediverse intentionally built their systems to be community-funded, algorithm-free, oriented around the tech-savvy, and otherwise deliberately eschewing the design principles behind corpo social media. None of that was an accident, it was the whole point.
So for people asking "when is the fediverse gonna create a competitor to tik tok" the answer is "never" because it was never its intent to do that. The friction is a feature, not a bug.
I hear there's some good ole' American highway overpasses for him and his to live under. Nice plush bed of used needles and broken beer bottles. Didn't ya hear? Rusted out grocery carriages are the new white picket fence! Yeehaw motherfucker.
Money is in fact an end.
And there's really two kinds of people to fleece with this one scheme: 1) people who want to leave MAGA but like most MAGA are addicted to buying worthless trash, and 2) people who are desperately trying to get their family out of MAGA so they send them this link to convince them. The human desire for catharsis is strong and therefore exploitable.