Something I do not see discussed enough in this context is the fact that whether or not Trump or any other potential asset is an actual knowing asset or not has no bearing on whether they act in the interests of the Russian government. If he does something in the interests of the Russian government it doesn’t really make that much of a difference if he is doing it knowingly or not. The effect of his actions is the same, the only difference is how likely you think he is to do another thing in the interests of the Russian government.
If he weakens the western alliances, withdraws from NATO, creates economic chaos, and makes everyone poorer then the Russian government benefits. Regardless of the cause of his behaviours they are still damaging, he is still destroying the US government, he is still hurting all sorts of people, and he is still destroying the global economy.
Asset or useful idiot, he is still setting the world on fire.
True, but privacy conscious people tend to also be wary of concentrations of power in a platform, such as Reddit or Twitter. If you are aware of the issues with a closed system you tend to also be aware of privacy issues, security issues, state censorship, and so on, so the user base is more aware in the fediverse and if they are leaving for Reddit that really does say something. I won’t be using their service, I feel very lucky to have found out about this before shifting as I was in the process of finding a stable email host and blending with the VPN seemed financially reasonable, guess I will stay with Mullvad and get a separate email provider.