At the very least it would buy more time as they are not just doing whatever the leader of the other party demands of them. As long as democracy is functioning enough for it to even be possible for the opposition candidates to win you should do everything you can to make that happen. It’s a whole different ballgame when that slips away.

Ideally (when it comes to the US) what stops him is that those kinds of orders would not be carried out or state officials would resist them. If that doesn’t happen it could be a Ukraine’s Maidan type situation where violence against protestors only creates more anger and eventually the pressure on politicians in power is high enough for them to do something. For Trump that would be enough Republicans finally standing up for the people instead of sucking up to the wannabe dictator…

Without a connected political action that the energy is channeled into the protests would be ineffective but the political action can be just people voting en masse as long as there are still fair elections where they can do that.

You don’t because everything here’s based on communities while Mastodon is on individual users. If you’d like something that does both in a single platform I think Mbin would be the best bet (although you can interact with Lemmy communities using Mastodon and other microblogging platforms to some extent)

Another vote for NeoDB. It’s been very useful for me and more people on fedi need to know about it.