It seems the fediverse is continuing and growing again. Line go up is probably good!
https://fediverse.observer/stats&months=50
Total users are huge now.
There are many websites out there that pull data from the fediverse. So take that with a grain of salt. But anecdotally I am seeing a small rise in people using the various platforms as each get more mature and servers somewhat stabilize.
I really do not get your point of tying liberalism with colonialism. Fact is that colonialism was done by European monarchies which weren't liberal states at the time. The power structures were feudal. They were only beginning to transition into liberal democracies.
I'm sorry, could you explain how colonialism was confined to, based on what you're saying here, at latest the eighteenth century? Even then, you're saying you don't understand how a political system that emerged in the exact places colonialism benefitted represents a political system that emerged out of colonialism?
Colonialism peaked in 19th century when countries doing it werent liberal democracies. Universal suffrage for men became thing only at the end of century. But widespread demands started in 1848. Before that voting was restricted to income/tax/property.
Not all european liberal democracies had colonies. But it is true that those countries that had them, didn't decolonize after liberalization.
Oh, lying. Well, that makes the most sense, really.
No, liberalism ("liberal democracy" is a bit of a misnomer) did not only emerge at the end of the nineteenth century just because you want to pretend it only counts as liberalism when it includes you. As I said in my original comment, liberalism has always used the rhetoric of freedom and equality while enforcing fundamentally unequal and oppressive systems of power. No, it doesn't start being "real" liberalism when non-property owning men get the right go vote (which, source on thar weirdly specific and inaccurate 1848 date? Go look up Jacksonian Democracy in the 1820s and -30s,, it was something widely demanded from the beginning of the United States). By this merit, there is no such thing as liberalism today, because it isn't an idealized version of itself yet; literally a rationalizing narrative to construct the violence of liberalism not as an inevitability or necessity of this system, but an unfortunate failure of it to live up to the "real" liberal values.
I could tell this was some Euro pro-imperialism narrative before you got to that second section too. This is the kind of historical revisionism they typically deploy to make this brutal system seem coincidental with rather than emergent from the violence they inflicted on the world. No, liberalism does not only need to exist in states that we associate with colonialism (even if it did, it wouldn't be accurate to act like borders stopped material interests in a system of colonialism). Liberalism came from systems that did rely on settler-colonialism for a reason, which is the same reason why the system of knowledge production on race, gender, ability, ethnicity, and humanity that we are forced to engage with happens to construct human life around the imperatives of that system. Could you explain how you're conscious of colonialism while only discussing its system in terms of its most privileged benefactors?
To others who come across this, this user is the exact kind of liberal conservative I'm talking about, and go figure, they're a Euro like I said they'd be.