A 27-minute post-election ramble podcast.

It's good to have a record of the things you posted and when you posted it. On August 12 of this year, I tweeted this: "When the NYT makes Trump sound like a reasonable candidate that a sane person might vote for, remember this day." I included a screen shot of the front pag...

My guess is that they haven't released enough code to run a Bluesky of your own, because all the answers from people who say they know say the same thing -- "It doesn't work that way." You could write your own, but if we were to do that, why use their one-off API, use a standard instead, and we might have a chance to interop with other systems in a meaningful way. I don't blame them for wanting to cash out, but I do blame them for conning people into believing it's some kind of escape. Until I hear otherwise Bluesky is a dead-end, not worth investing your hope in. If you're migrating from Twitter this is no better. Keep looking. But I promise to let you know if I get any info that changes my opinion, so if I've got it wrong, people from Bluesky, just answer the freaking question in the post at the top of this page. Thanks.

If Bluesky is open source, which it appears to be, someone who has time and has experience packaging products, should create a Bluesky distribution for a few popular hosting services, so installing a new instance is as simple as it can possibly be. One click? That would be aw...

Does anyone know who was doing the work at kamalahq on the various social networks? I wonder if they would like to keep posting. They stopped updating on Election Day. We could change the names of the accounts. I thought it was great that there was a steady source of political news that didn't equivocate like the NYT-inspired news orgs. I would love to help fund a continuation of that flow.

It might be time to get our shit together.

I wrote this piece this morning on my iPad before I got up. It's a third rail piece. A couple of weeks ago I wouldn't have posted it for fear that it would ruin my life. Today it has to be said because I'm pretty sure this is where we have to start rebuilding the opposition party of the US.

There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that what's missing in the two-party system in the US is that one of the parties does not own a social network. It is not represented online 7-by-24-by-12 every year, not just presidential election years. Democrats, when you lose it's because you didn't show up. It's happened three times so far, at least. We could have led here because most of the innovators in this space vote Democratic, but the leadership doesn't listen. The voters could get to know all the stars of the parties. People were right when they said they didn't know Harris. It's time to let the leaders rise from the net, not just from the insiders. This is how you do it.

ChatGPT's web search can search my blog, as I do on Google, but it's way more useful. Here's a screen shot. We're getting there. Really nice.

I asked ChatGPT: "Based on what you know about me, draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like."

I'd like to hear from tech vendors, asap, which ones will help American voters learn what's true independent of whatever "truth" the government wants us to believe? Who will stand with the people? A good question for all of us to ask. Ask news orgs the same question.

I see they have a piece about the "Manosphere." Stop blaming men. Lose that habit now. It's toxic.

It's worth listening to On The Media, interview with Masha Gassen, saying that the authoritarian government will want to define what's true and not. Since we now understand that most of the information flow now goes around the NYT, CNN etc -- even Fox, and largely through soc...

BTW, there's a lot of talk about new ways to communicate that don't depend on silos that could be sold to billionaires. One way to do it is with my product FeedLand. It manages news streams for feeds you subscribe to. I think every publication should share news from feeds they depend on, experts they quote, other news sources they read. We can build our own networks this way. We've done it before and can do it again. The advantage of this approach is that it is truly decentralized and not at all complicated to use. Here's the news stream I provide for readers of my blog. It's the most popular feature on the site. With FeedLand you can create your own.

I've actually written a lot, but haven't wanted to publish most of it. So many reasons why the Dems lost. Maybe I should just list them. Biden shouldn't have run again. There would have been a primary. Given the result of the election this week, we should have found out wha...

Not much time to write today and tomorrow.

PS: I bet Bezos wishes he had bought Twitter.

Final note (I think). The pain you feel at first may abate. It did for me. I had pushed down memories of 2020. It was a horror show, and Trump was the main character. So the first thing I had to deal with is that I don't want to remember that. Too painful. But once I realized that's not where we are right now, it's a totally different situation, that's when the creative impulse rose as the pain receded. We have one short term thing to do -- keep the campaign running, and long term we have to recognize division we add, and counteract it. We are the party that welcomes everyone regardless or race, religion, country of origin, age or gender. All of them. No exceptions. The election result represents big change. It's a good time to make more changes.

"Richest man in the world" doesn't begin to cover Musk's ambition. He wants "all the money in the world."

Also to the Twitter founders, amassing that much power and centralizing it as Twitter did, had a cost that we're paying now. But it's very hard to stop when the juggernaut is rolling. I understand, but in the future we have to think about this more clearly. When a medium becomes too big and centralized, there's trouble ahead. It was accidental that Trump was the one to take advantage of this to route around journalism and go direct, but it was not accidential that Musk did.

My longtime friend, Mike Arrington said next time have a primary. He has a point. Would Harris have been the nominee if the Dems had had a normal primary process? Who knows. Maybe the voters could have told us then that what happened yesterday was coming.

Speaking of Musk, maybe he will temper Trump's desire for retribution. It may be a vain hope, but I'll cling to it anyway. Doing business in a world of retribution might not be too conducive to the creativity needed to run innovative tech businesses. A climate of fear doesn't inspire great software. I know the quality of products Musk makes, I own and love my Tesla Model Y. Best car I've ever owned or driven.

Ben Thompson wrote in his Stratechery newsletter: "What is fascinating is how this fundamentally transforms any attempt to evaluate the Twitter acquisition. From a business perspective it’s a massive failure, and might always be: Musk paid too much for Twitter as it was, and ...

Speaking of Carville, yesterday's Trippi podcast with Carville as the only guest was the best podcast I've ever heard. I recommended it yesterday as inspirational. Now that we know the outcome of the election, it's a marker of where we were before the results were known. A world that no longer exists. But like stories written in 2016, the markers are useful to see where we once were and how we got here, and what we can learn from what happened between. I wish it had turned out the way these two great friends thought it should have. But it didn't. But there was a hint that they knew what wouldn't work this time. No spoilers.

Be generous with all classes of people, by gender, age, race, religion, whatever is used to divide us. Stop vilifying men. Carville was right. There's no reason to make one whole gender the scapegoat for all our problems. It's no accident that the Repubs own the men. We could...

Blame is pointless. It may be emotionally satisfying at some level, but it is division, and that's why we keep losing elections. We don't see it but we create our own divisions. This must stop.

What we should do now. Don't shut down the campaign. We must keep communicating with the electorate, independent of what they get from the news orgs. The Harris campaign did an exemplary job. Why shut it down. Keep setting the agenda. Help keep us organized. Preserve the perspective and expectation of democracy in the US. Change the message from raising money, to keeping us all in touch with the opposition (ie us). This is the mistake we made in every election since we had the web to organize. The Repubs, almost by accident, never stopped organizing. And now that Musk, who will be part of the new administration, owns Twitter, you can be sure they will stay and get more organized. We can do it too! We have to stop making this mistake of going back to zero after election, whether we win or lost.

In 2016, on the night of Election Day, when it was obvious Trump would win, before taking a Xanax and going to sleep, I wrote a piece, that my friend Chuck Shotton says I should run again. Rather than doing that, I'll quote the important part. "I don't think it's about economics, I think it's about change happening too fast. And the Trump voters had the power to bring it to a screeching halt, they saw the chance and took it."

I prayed. I really did. But I got the wrong answer.