It looks like we’re heading for some dark times next year. I think we should consider setting SPE to “private mode” now so that only registered users can read threads and posts. This will offer a thin layer of protection if the US does go full fascism at some point next year.
To be clear, this has nothing to do with preventing certain users from Unstuck Politics from reading these threads. UP should probably set their forum to private as well, and in any event, anyone can still make an account here (although we may want to revisit that in 2025).
I don’t have super strong feelings about this but I don’t want to live in fear.
If we really get to the point where jackboots are going to come for me because of opinions posted on the internet…
I mean I don’t even know how to finish that sentence. But by that point there will be an underground resistance and blood flowing in the streets and I think SPE will be the least of our problems.
Plus maybe this ship has sailed but I still have hopes that our community will attract new people and that becomes pretty much impossible if we’re locked down.
I think it’s reasonable to consider, although we probably have at least a few months to decide before it really matters, and I’m guessing most of us would be way more likely to get rounded up off old donations, volunteering, public facing social media posts, voter rolls, etc.
As pessimistic as I am in a Project 2025 scenario, I don’t think it gets to that point. Activists, progressive DAs, people running abortion clinics, journalists, undocumented immigrants, liberal donors, etc is a big group. Getting down to anti-Trump social media and forum posts means putting 50-100M people in cages.
But I do think it’s worth discussing now, and the downside to going private is not that large. So from a risk/reward standpoint, I could be convinced.
My best friends dad growing up taught a bunch of stuff about the Holocaust at a college level. Not sure if he stole this quote from someone else, but he used to say not a lot of optimists survived the holocaust.
That’s not to say we’re facing that kind of level of an event, just that I think some pessimism is warranted.
Potentially losing visibility to attract new members I guess, but I don’t think we’ve actually attracted any new members who didn’t come here from Unstuck Politics since site launch, and posters from Unstuck Politics can always come and make an account here without needing to be able to view things as a guest.
Way more likely to attract some stalker from Ch13f5 Pl4n3t who searches for usernames than anyone new worth having. Also have to imagine some malevolent AI will spider and cache any internet forum post it can find (if it’s not already happening) to use against you later at some point regardless of whether 2025 includes a hairpin turn into fascism. Aggregating all of your posts from all public forums plus metadata and whatever else it can find. Anyone with a significant number of posts has a nice corpus for stylometric fingerprinting before even considering all of the other data you generate.
My dudes I’ve been reading all your posts for 20 years and still have no idea what half you even do or where you live, much less your real names, I think you’re ok.
I pretty much co-sign everything Mr. Duker wrote upthread.
I voted no, but there is a middle ground…
Discourse has the ability to make categories/threads less visible by means of the Trust Level system. We could pretty easily make a TL3-only category/section.
It wouldn’t be scrapable by search engine/AI bots. A person who wanted to see the TL3-only area would need to register and participate in a fairly convincing way to achieve TL3 status. It wouldn’t be foolproof, but it would perhaps help allay some of the concerns motivating this thread, while leaving a door open for legitimately interested new people.
To be clear, I do expect people to get rounded up, and I do think I’m pretty pessimistic. But I don’t think it’s likely they can round up 20-30% of the population to kill/imprison, which is what we’re probably talking about if they’re rounding up posters on Internet forums.
Like, I think I’m a thousand times more likely to get rounded up for knocking doors for Dems in 2020 than for posting here. That said, the downside of taking this private is minimal and if there’s any risk it removes of a catastrophic outcome, it’s probably worth it.
Voted no because private mode just gives a false sense of security. If you really think posting here can get you into trouble then you should have started using TOR a long time ago.