Quoting the author
I’ve starting working on a lemmy front end called lemmy-ui-leptos using leptos, a Rust UI framework with isomorphic support, and tailwind + daisyUI for the component styling. This could eventually replace the frankenstein’s monster that lemmy-ui has become.
The fediverse in general is the literal manifest of the means of production owned by the producers. Every denizen can see just about every post.
You would be hard pressed to not find the socialist ethos at play anywhere on the fediverse, not just Lemmy. And really that’s part of what gets hashed out here by broader adoption is just how ground level that gets.
The weird part is that whatever they think of dictators, they would know the model, and that gives me a bizarre amount of trust.
Can you explain this more?
Sure! And I’m sorry in advance for the book, I’m literally around here studying this thing for this reason.
So it might help to understand Soviet as a pre Bolshevik term more resembling ‘council’ than a unitary block like a nation.
In the fediverse this is instances, they stand up, enroll users and give them voices. And if you graph a lot of the ethos it’s 1:1 from the ground up. For instance, you might say your posts here, once contributed are owned by everyone. You might also notice those with knowledge about the platform are maybe operating as a vanguard, you pick top or bottom (users and posts, or instances and software).
Historically part of the problem with distributed systems of independent operating electors is how they’re vulnerable either to local tribalism, warlordism, and a need for some degree of functional central control of core ethos.
The pile of ‘free market’ people mad at the phone company evolved into the modern Internet without a model, just chaos and genius. If the next wave is reactionary communists, we’re looking at something very different, but I’m not convinced it won’t mutate.
if this is communism the platform: I’m genuinely curious what crowd sourced central planning offers. The people who have studied that system, and it’s problems, are the ones in who have started the project. And they started with ‘to each for each’ as it’s core principle, but it’s easy to fork any foss project.
Part of what you learn when you start to read lefty philosophy is that they are (by volume and diversity), their own biggest critics. So there is going to be a plethora of times where we figure out of this is going to go pear shaped, and a ton of good or bad lessons that could come out of the canon.
In your analogy, where does Fast.ly fit in by being the only entity capable of handling mastodon.social traffic?
In your analogy, what do you make of mastodon.world and lemmy.world, which is a private company offering the service for “free”?
In your analogy, what do you make of the numerous cases of instances shutting down because the admin could not keep with the growth, or got run over by freeloaders who pissed on the well?
If “the fediverse in general is the literal manifest of the means of production owned by the producers”, does this mean that its “economic output” will always be inferior to other economic systems that are driven by profit motive? IOW, does this mean that the Fediverse is always going to be a small thing who will never be able to replace Big Tech?
So in reverse order:
The fediverse to me will always be an expanding niche, I don’t think the network effect social growth works without cash. If your looking to measure by quality of dialogue instead of growth I think this presents the best option. There’s plenty of economic benefit beyond ad sales from good discourse.
Instead you’re looking a million AOL install disk moments until ubiquity, if it doesn’t fall apart first.
Instances shutting down is actually markedly like the way famine, war or anything else beyond my control as your average user would have pushed us to other reps. You can pick up and move, but how much of your stuff? Open question. Long term it should be feasible for your own instance to fire up, fetch messages and close again, so in theory you could keep all of it.
Now hardest: scale and cost, which I’d really contend are the same problem. If you look at how such systems are introduced you find advocates for vanguard, reps, workers tribunals and nothing quite ever sticks without some lingering problems. And the reality is the web of our modern universe isn’t going to independently operate with anything.
I don’t think anything but a charitable model gets it off the ground, the same way I don’t think the Internet is a thing without the crazy good folks running BBS boards. But it should be institutional as broadly as possible if you want long term success and trust in platform.
I think perhaps you may be confusing nobody to assert ownership of the bits, with the supposition that there is no cost on delivery.
The absolute opposite, actually. There is a cost to content distribution and for the maintenance of the service beyond the servers. Moderation, system administration, bug fixing, security research, optimizations in storage…
Putting up a server is the easy part. Ensuring that it can serve its users well, not so much. To do it properly, it becomes a part-time job. Now that there is an element of novelty to it, we will see many people sticking around to this work, but as the novelty wears off, they will either treat it like work or stop doing it altogether. We can see that happening already with Mastodon.
The reality is you already know there are people to do much of that job. A local ran a BBS for a town of 15k where I lived growing up. The moderators at Reddit were never paid, but they did it.
Point taken they whether they will do it here, but I think the descent from ubiquity to hobbyism again might do social media some good.
I’ve been through the collapse of the last vestiges of both Usenet and independent message boards, so I’m familiar with the perils of funding, and the deceptive costs of free. But wikipedia lives, hell even headfi still lives, there is a place within any market to be carried by it’s enthusiastic.
There’s a difference between a tankie and a communist, and they are tankies.
Then they’ll certainly have a lot more centralized control in mind than I would. But I’ve been too too many punk concerts and heard poser, and seen too many misplaced lobs of entryism to dismiss anyone behind a pejorative. Especially while the free speech instances are running the same software right along with beehaw.
And more importantly some people can be smart at one thing and dumb elsewhere, just look at Ben Carson.