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.

I think you misunderstood socialism if centralized control was what you took from it. The are both centralized and decentralized varieties, the operation is in common good (or purpose). Most of the organizing principles at a microlevel you can find in non profits, co-ops etc, none of which demand any market conditions at all. Governments maintaining socialist claims often muck this up.

The phrase “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is definitely in line with the philosophy at play. There’s not a lot of profit motive to be found. It didn’t even have to be divorced from self interest since we all want a better platform.

I can respect a view that software is not politics, but the intentions to it are certainly wrapped in expression. Here the primary controllers were corporations of your bits and they are put sociocratically back in your hands like it or not.

But importantly you can’t take your ball and go home. What you contribute here lives in a zillion caches.

Edit: ‘r’

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.

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.

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.

Ole Brent is going to find the terms of entry a lot less favorable.

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.

It’ll get more support with some time. For now it’s a nice browser to keep separate for not polluting what you doing mind putting out in public. I’ve had a lot more smooth experiences with PWAs I load through the ddg browser.

Actually one area I think it’s got an immediate edge on firefox while the wild wild fediverse sorts out is just how many fewer attack vectors it’s presenting with the pared back features.

Important to note there are options.

I’ve been relatively pleased with the duckduckgo mobile browser. There are a reasonable amount of chromium forks that aim for privacy oriented browsing as well, although I don’t have a specific one to endorse.

I guess in defense of Mozilla: it isn’t really playing a different game in the browser space, they’re just trying to mitigate some of the toxicity of ad revenue as a foundation. They’re still a non profit hiring from the same pool as the tech industry money printing machine.

There’s still a limited pool of support they have to pull from, and I like it better with them around so the big 3 don’t have a total monopoly on browser architecture.

That said it’s maybe the best example the model is flawed at the jump.

It’s a very interesting thought, but it will always struggle to account for variables you can’t see.

It’s always going to be designed top down to approximate your own development as human from the ground up. I don’t douby AI as a feasible possibility, but I don’t think we’re headed for digital clones. They’re always going to have some amount of the creators ghost or assumptions in the machine.

Thank you!

I’m not immersed enough in the specific code to load images and would like to know as well, but I can attest it’s definitely a problem in email architecture. @dessalines@lemmy.ml is probably the party you want if you want first hand info.

Also a stellar example of why I wish we could actually work together a little more. The ideological opt out of raddles software shows there are indeed legitimate concerns on platform privacy, but rather than work to harden it we’re behind walls hucking pejoratives. Hundreds of years of team red vs team black, and I am exhausted with it.

I’ve checked the frontpage from time to time just to monitor what’s changing, but I have yet to log in.

My, if it isn’t the consequences of his own actions come to find Elmo again.

Wow, I didn’t think they’d implement anything more cancerous than various site preferred paywalling. This reeks of needing some good numbers to blow out headed into the IPO.

If it’s this bad already, get ready for a circus.

I used Feedly before defaulting to reddit as sites slowly collapsed RSS functionally.

Curious to know as well, but most of the time I see a couple sites mentioned that I haven’t been impressed with their ability to sift the trade mags and studies I was in it for.

It’s a distilled version of ‘the wisdom of the crowds’. With all the dog piling that comes with reactions to things that are pointed at the wrong audience. There’s generally some people with baggage in there somewhere who will take issue, and you get downvoted.

However, what’s always interesting about these platforms is where good ideas rise, where they come from, and how controversial they are, all of which you lose with the twitter/mastodon architecture.

It may be easier to find your crowd, but how useful is that to you depends on what you use your online presence for.

I think some of that devolution going to be inevitable or you’re going to face charges of censorship from some corners, which is just it’s own cycle of rage. The network gets bigger, people click what they click and the aggregate of what our animal brains react to has a lot to be angry about.

What I worry most about is the acceleration of that cycle because we gradually gravitate towards instances with our preferred moderation or slant, which I can already see happening anyway.

I guess, at best, that It might be a cure with some side effects because it’s necessarily going to play with in/out crowd dynamics.

If this is at an instance level… Fine? As long as it’s visible.

I’d worry you’re promoting some amount of information siloing if the current general purpose instance structure doesn’t hold though.

I’ve got 2, largely out of curiosity for what defederation meant as far as user perspective.

When exporting comes online I’ll likely make an effort to spin up an instance if it’s still feasible… So there will be a 3rd cake?On the positive side I don’t think you’re going to find many people wanting to sock puppet mild takes and noise rock.