Find widely known orgs that use the platform, the BBC comes to mind here. Search for other well known orgs to point out so you don’t just have one example. Highlight the fact that other platforms are cross linking to the fediverse (Meta’a threads for example) so a fediverse presence will give the city a presence on those platforms with no extra effort needed. Point out that Twitter has become an unreliable platform due to ownership change and that that situation could replay itself at any time on any centralized platform. Help people get Mastodon working on phones if needed - the official app is quite good. Basically just sell the platform as best you can, don’t go heavy on ideology and focus on practical benefits.

In my experience many of the people who haven’t quit are self medicating for attention or depressive reasons. Of the folks I know who vape about half were diagnosed with ADHD later in life (30+) and quit after finding a stimulant medication that worked for them. The rest are unmedicated and self medicating with nicotine and coffee or energy drinks. Self medicating is overlooked in virtually every discussion about nicotine and I’d like to see it considered more often when the topic comes up.

Finally. Are they actually hiring decent UX folks this time or are they using the people who designed 1980s VCR programming UIs again?

Offer to help setup the account and show them how to use Mastodon in general.

Also, not necessarily applicable to you but worth keeping in mind: encourage organizations to run Mastodon instances/provide Mastodon hosting for their employees or members in addition to providing email addresses. If an org is providing email to employees or members for business correspondence they could easily provide Mastodon services as well, this enables public discussion with the org in twitter format without a third party controlling the platform.

I’m surprised it’s not being delivered by cruise missile

Who could have possibly known? It’s almost as if the <35 demographic showed up to every election every time then policies they support may become a priority. Who could have thunk it?

The wrong Amazon is burning

Nothing says love like bringing a noose

I’m anticipating the biggest and best hit of schadenfreude ever as we watch these clowns get the same treatment leftist activists have been receiving since the 1950s. Hell, we got beaten with clubs and shot with rubber coated bullets just protesting the Gulf war or income inequality. Let the folks trying a coup get a taste as well.

Trump will make America great again by making sure our rivers are just as flammable as they were in the late 1960s.

This is the big one I want too. I’d love to curate topic based feeds from multiple communities so that other people could subscribe to a single coffee feed instead of 5-8 communities that they had to find themselves. I think this would be particularly useful for new people joining Lemmy, it would save a lot of time if they could just sub to a couple of multi’s and start getting content they’re interested in rather than needing to build their sub list entirely from scratch.

Yeah same. When he started topping my feed despite me blocking him I ejected from his platform and washed my hands of the whole thing.

US “news” is billionaire propaganda designed to push whatever world view best supports their financial interests and/or any bizarre philosophy they’ve decided is most correct

Please stop, I can only be so erect

And the lack of parents at home during the day to parent, and the fact that those parents are exhausted at night when they both finish working.

We’ve really created a perfect storm of horrible conditions to raise healthy and well adjusted children

They’re using the same playbook the FBI used to split leftists and prevent successful rallying around community leaders in the 60s, 70s and 80s. It’s time tested and it works.

When I logged in about six weeks after the ownership change my feed included Elon Musk, Andrew Tate and 2-3 other right wing influencers. I follow none of these people, I have zero interest in what they have to say and I find them reprehensible. I deleted my account and haven’t used the platform since.

The BBC, NPR and the NY Times. NPR in their effort to seem unbiased allows Republicans to frame the discussion of all things political and NPR participates rather than calling out obvious falsehoods or reframing any issue around facts. I bucket them firmly in the neoliberal controlled opposition camp. The NYT has become yet another corporate mouthpiece and the BBC does whatever they do. I never paid much attention to CNN but I engage with them even less now that they’ve switched to FOX’s manufactured outrage “entertainment” model rather than engaging in journalism.

So, uh, all of those? I can’t handle popular Republican “news” sources, they tend to twist facts in the name of this week’s political expediency or simply lie.

Edit: I’d like to say “literally any corporate news source” here too, all of them present a view of the world that reinforces their owners’ worldview and/or lobbies in their interest. All media should be carefully evaluated for a slant that benefits the owner of the publication regardless of their apparent political stance.

Kinda reminds me of classic authors like Heinlein.

Heinlein or Niven are pretty accurate comparisons IMO