I don’t really think mastodon needs those 5% to produce content to entertain and advertise a userbase of 95% lurkers. For me it’s definitely a bonus that they’re not there - I don’t need influencer-shit in my feed.

If that kind of content creator and passive user goes to Bluesky that’s fine. If they went to mastodon we’d just see calls for an algorithm, which would be directly against what I want in the platform.

Problem with algorithms showing popular content is that once you have them, you’ll have people trying to use them to make money. And by extension people trying to manipulate you for profit. Doesn’t have to be the platform itself doing it for it to be harmful.

People turn fascist when they’re desperate and angry, same as always. So when people experience economic hardship they look for somone to blame, often immigrants. So we call them racists, and I guess that’s true, but it comes from something else; economic inequality.

In Europe we do the same thing, in the French elections the rural population voted overwhelmingly for the fascists - here in brown.

In the German elections, the poorer former East-German provinces also supported the fascist AfD, here shown in the darker colours.

Even in Denmark, where I live, the more right-wing and extremist parties are popular in the southern, western, and northern parst of the country - the poorer rural areas, who’s seen their jobs disappear, their shops close, and their income stall even as the country as a whole gets richer.

So the challenge of liberal democracy is clear; show the population outside the cities that they, too, can get their piece of the pie. If we cannot solve that, then we’ll see more countries turn fascist in the next decade.