At best, you’ll get some bureaucratic oversight and the “right” to make proposals regarding changes in governance: “use the money to upgrade the server or to pay the admin”, “Allow some members to get free access because they are facing some hardship, yes or no?” etc

That sounds pretty good to me

Right, long term nothing is more important than retaining agency over their major methods of interaction with members and fostering vibrant online communities that feed into positive momentum.

Why bluesky instead of mastodon?

Because there is only so much oxygen in the room, and corporate ventures like Bluesky seem to come into really exciting DIY community spaces that are creating amazing things and pull the oxygen out of the room while never quite delivering on what they are promising… or seeming to promise… and in the mean time the projects that originally created the innovative energy in the space are lost in the noise.

I mean… see basically the entire early history of the commercialization of personal computers for endless repetitions of this pattern.

Remember we are not the customers of corporate social media companies, we are the raw husks they extract value from through surveillance capitalism and ads/paid content.

The US was unwilling to go full scorched earth, the potential effect of the US bomber fleet using just conventional munitions was described as having the potential to do almost as much devastation as a nuclear strike, despite the warcrimes the US still held back.

Look I want to live in a universe with a version of the US without Henry Kissinger too, but this just doesn’t seem like an honest view of the history here.

I don’t understand in what sense the U.S. held back from bombing. Fuck, one of the major criticisms of U.S. military strategy in the Vietnam war was the idea that if they just bombed them hard enough, over and over and over again carpet bombing with B-52s loaded to the brim with conventional bombs, than that would magically win the war all by itself.

Along the way, Rolling Thunder also fell prey to the same dysfunctional managerial attitudes as did the rest of the American military effort in Southeast Asia. The process of the campaign became an end unto itself, with sortie generation as the standard by which progress was measured.[129] Sortie rates and the number of bombs dropped, however, equaled efficiency, not effectiveness.[130]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder

https://renewvn.org/the-most-bombed-place-on-earth/

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/2eae918ca40a4bd7a55390bba4735cdb#%3A~%3Atext=Between+1965+and+1975%2C+the%2Caerial+bombardment+in+human+history.

https://www.maginternational.org/what-we-do/where-we-work/laos/

To be clear, I don’t think this makes the illegal Russian invasion and war in Ukraine okay. I am against the war and support arming Ukrainians, fuck Putin, but I think it is important to be realistic about things as we discuss this. I am not even sure the Russian military could even approach a conventional bombing campaign on the same scale, I certainly don’t think they could do it without getting absolutely chewed up by AA since most of the munitions would have to be likely delivered by ground attack aircraft like the su-25 or even more vulnerable strategic bombers.

A bombing campaign of that size is essentially impossible to do in a near peer conflict like the war in Ukraine which is an environment where both sides have extensive missiles armaments, radar and electronic warfare capabilities.