this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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It's not like they are programming communism into Lemmy.
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.
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.
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.
Software isn't politics, and the fediverse is also the very definition of a free market. Nobody is stopping you from profiting from the lemmy or ActivityPub project, as you can see from Meta's interest in the project. I'm libertarian and I have contributed to the lemmy project because it interested me. I certainly don't agree with the creators politically, but I think they make some decent software that I want to be a part of.
If it is political at all, it's arguably anti-socialist because no instance has any control over other instances as everything is consensual. However, since everything is open, it does allow government surveillance unless you use a service like Matrix that's E2E encrypted (and even then, you'd have to control membership).
So no, it's not communist/socialist, it's just decentralized and federated. Software isn't political, so please stop trying to make it so.
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'
I feel like I understand socialism quite well. On one hand you have heavy top-down states like the USSR, and on the opposite end of the spectrum you have libertarian socialism as championed by people like Noam Chomsky (i.e. co-ops and unions in a pseudo-market economy). When I say "socialism" I generally mean the umbrella that covers both the former and democratic socialist states since both benefit from concentrating power into the hands of a few (e.g. look at how Western countries control information dissemination). Libertarian socialism just doesn't exist outside of universities, so I tend to discount it.
If you build it, they will come. Look at all the shilling that exists on SM, such as on Reddit, Twitter, etc.
In its current state, it's essentially a hobby project. I work on Lemmy-related projects because I find it fun, not because I'm trying to overthrow capitalism or anything like that. Likewise, I use Linux because it solves my problems better than other systems, not because I'm trying to rob Microsoft or Apple of a sale.
I consider myself a pretty laissez faire libertarian, yet my interests align with socialists. If you look around on lemmy, you'll find people from all stripes here, from anarchocapitalists to tankies, and everyone in between. The only people I don't see much of here are Trump loyalists and fascists, and I think that has more to do with moderation than the nature of the software.
And it just so happens that people from a variety of political leanings value expression, they just want to filter out expression they don't like. That's where moderation comes in. You can have polar opposite instances with the same high level goals, just very different moderation. Look at the difference between Lemmygrad and Exploding Heads, two very different ideologies using the same platform with very different moderation.
And that's what I mean when I say software isn't politics.
So I'm stuck on a phone, you'll have to forgive my lack of quotes since you actually have nice formating!
This is a purely tautological issue, and a product of my pisspoor audiencing. I mentioned ethos and pointed out governance is often bad at implementation, but I don't think that's collated well.
So it might help to understand that your references to socialist are looking at the business end of building government of a historians philosophy. Which is to say, a little removed from the ethos.
My chief bone to pick is socialist governance rarely if ever in modern parlance acknowledges what the social is in direct response to. But the much better example here is the most profound socialist institution in all of the United States, your local public library.
So just to back up, Marx's contention was following capital interests throughout history, and specifically the Habsburg era, was a better indicator for why anything happened than any great man in the time. After all every great man has many powerful (or wealthy) men in his camp. And the Habsburgs were generally the wealthiest, even if their name wasn't on a ton of letterhead.
The socialism/ist ethos says why not run things to put people over capital interests. Most of what comes next in various local histories tries to figure that out, lots of which I wish I knew a lot less about.
But, to answer the question on the spot about why lemmygrad and exploding heads, common purpose. Both acknowledges having a corporate 3rd party is bad for conversation and is willing to remove the incentive from the platform and leave moderation for how much to put up from the users. But we're only talking about the platform, they don't need common reasons for it.
It's a cause (expression) at the expense of a business model, which in any sense is 'seizure of the means of production'. Which is all I'm pointing to, solidarity around a goal, or many goals, achieved with the same work. Now if you're talking about fediverse architecture we get a little more wonky, I made a long comment about how activitypub on Lemmy looks like pre Bolshevik soviets in actual structure that I stand by, but the point is the instances are flat using the same protocols.
Likewise I think if Linux meets your needs you're in solidarity with a similar if stalled project. The difference is Microsoft and Apple aren't going to tip over, reddit and Twitter aren't profitable before they had to complete with a free product, which you're helping make better.
As someone whose not in any position to do the work and just looks on: I am absolutely not trying to steal your agency, please do not stop because of me! Part of being the dope that studies how people organize is that I'm going to use words like politics and government rest of everybody, but these words are really about how we decide and how we organize at their roots.
I will say part of the dirty secret in socialist thinking is not to divorce the interest you have. The 'find solidarity' part of me would point out by keeping these projects in use and alive you make it a possibility for someone else interested later to also contribute or use it. Which in turn could be their own on ramp into future success. If you think something you're involved with should continue on without you, well... Why?
I'm generally cagey when it comes to putting myself on any political map for reasons that are probably immediately obvious from my profile. But I come from the land of Locke and Mill and would probably still agree the government that governs best governs least as a general purpose maxim, even if the caveats get longer every year.
What wrapped me around the donut hole was noticing Trotsky and Jefferson both had a real axe to grind on entrenchment, and finally sitting down to read Kropotkin and Bakunin. We don't have anything similar I ever found in the western canon.
I don't find an ism that rings especially true at all, but I know a decent cause when I see one.
Inter-instance relations are ABSOLUTELY political in their own right.
For example db0 was/is working on some kind of add on to lemmy that would automatically defederate certain servers based on certain factors and a circle of trust or something (better explanation here https://dbzer0.com/blog/overseer-a-fediverse-chain-of-trust/ )
Anyway many of us admins were concerned about who controlled that system, how it could be abused, etc. it got pretty well, political, in the admin group chat.
In any situation where there's a power dynamic- it is political. Software maintainers absolutely have some degree of power.
That's not software being political, that's admins using software for political goals. That same web of trust (or whatever it is) isn't political, it only gets political when you choose who or what is in that web. It can be used to limit spam, or it can be used to silence opposing views.
A far left and a far right person could use the same software for opposite political ends. You can see precisely that with Lemmygrad vs Exploding Heads, both use the same software stack, the main difference is in the moderation. Lemmy itself isn't really political, it's just that the people admining the original instance have a certain agenda.
Some software is more compatible with certain ideologies than others (e.g. decentralized tools like blockchain is near useless for an autocratic regime), but even then you'd probably be surprised how your tool is being used (e.g. Tor was created by the US military, and now it's largely use to subvert law enforcement and international espionage). It just so happens that humans are really good at molding tools to different purposes.
It's still not great. Programming is a form of communication, and the platforms you design will reflect the kinds of messages you want to nurture and propogate. I made terms with it, electing to use lemmy in the fediverse on an instance they don't manage (theirs are lemmy.ml and lammygrad.ml), because kbin wasn't quite prime time ready yet. But if I were going to keep using Lemmy once kbin is more mature, lemmy would need to be developed with a decentralized governance committee or there would need to be a hard fork
I mean they kinda are, they run one of the biggest instances which of course will get a lot of attention because it's run by the developers.
On that instance they censor criticism of china and other such topics.
There was also the weird case of the hardcoded slur filter
But nothing it stopping you from running your own instance or joining one with moderation you agree with. You can even modify the source code to remove the slur filter and go 100% Nazi if you want.
I don't have an account at lemmy.ml and I doubt I ever will. I also don't sub to all that many of their communities, and those I do have very low likelihood of ever triggering that filter.
I consider myself a free market libertarian and I have contributed to the lemmy project. There are certainly things I disagree with, but in general I think it's an interesting project worth spending my time on. And none of my complaints have anything to do with politics, but are more technical in nature (i.e. I have serious concerns about scaling). So I'm working on something lemmy adjacent that I think is interesting to address my specific concerns (basically fully distributed like BitTorrent), but I continue to use and contribute to Lemmy in the meantime.
So no, it's not communist, socialist, or any other form of political ideology, it's just a federated social network.
@sugar_in_your_tea @NotAPenguin I think I agree with you in general and I’m really not worried about some set of words I might not see, but it is a very strange position from the project runners to make this decision in this way imo. I just don’t love seeing FOSS owners tossing a constraint in like this; particularly hardcoding the thing. It makes me anxious in a somewhat slippery slope kinda way that they might flip some other ideological switch on people
But the fact that we're talking about it means the system is working as intended. Someone noticed something odd in the code and raised a concern to discuss it. I also disagree with the maintainers on this, but from a different angle (i.e. I don't think built-in filters actually work, we should instead be relying on moderators and moderation tools).
At the end of the day, the maintainers get to choose what changes to accept, and contributors can decide whether to contribute. If contributors are annoyed enough, they can easily fork the project. That's how open source projects work.
It's not a democratic system, it's a consensus system, and the community can choose which fork to follow.
@sugar_in_your_tea yeah I think we’re in agreement here. And I agree it does mean that FOSS works. Nice thing too is the protocol isn’t at all locked down. They could entirely lose the plot and hardcode some insane stuff into their #activitypub implementation and we could still more or less play from another instance of another service from what I understand
Yup, and there are some good examples of projects that have done something similar, such as GrapheneOS which broke from CopperheadOS. Open source can be messy, but at least there's the option to fork the project.