Phileosopher

joined 1 year ago
[–] Phileosopher 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Your reasoning touches on a deep philosophical concept: what is "ownership"?

I'd say owning something is easy enough when you can't duplicate it (I can't just copy your car or house to save money). Duplication, however, means the ownership is technically the abstraction of "intellectual property", which worked fine when duplicating cost money and people paid money for it.

However, the very essence of using a computer on a network is simply using copies. You're not reading this as I write it, but a copy your computer downloaded.

[–] Phileosopher 1 points 1 year ago

My personal preference is to use another browser altogether, such as Brave or Vivaldi, and set it to delete everything upon close. I'm sure I'll get hate for the fact that Chromium is quite leaky.

If it's a mobile browser, you could use ffUpdater to download a separate instance of Firefox, but the Gecko framework on PC seems to loathe other Gecky framework instances.

Or, if you're super tinfoily, stick it inside a newly spun VM everytime!

[–] Phileosopher 7 points 1 year ago

I don't think so. FLOSS devs never seem to attract FLOSS designers. I'd love to collab with them, but they all seem to like designing not-FLOSS things.

[–] Phileosopher 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Who said we're in late stage capitalism? If you ask the libertarians, we've been out of any sincere capitalism since WWII.

 

I only partly live under a rock, so I've now heard that the Facebooks is making Threads, and it'll talk to Mastodon.

Any idea how to keep them from taking over? Apparently, you're a weirdo these days if you use Firefox, Brave/Qwant, and trust FLOSS > proprietary.

[–] Phileosopher 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So how do people go about defederating? Is it just a matter of making new servers, or does it require anything else?

I'm happy to stand up against The Man, but it seems like once the masses get involved they don't feel personally responsible to preserve what they enjoy. They seem to give general consensus to [Big Tech Company], then [hard-working FLOSS developer] comes in later to fix it.

If I'm going to get "political" here, I almost think people need to be sold more on the importance of self-reliance. One prior historical precedent was around the 1750's about taxation, and that's had a nearly non-trivial impact on society. People intuitively grasp land ownership, so it should translate to data ownership as well.

[–] Phileosopher 17 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I may be speaking in defense of something I don't know, but I don't see a direct problem with other apps (e.g., Threads, Twitter if they change up what they're doing) to start talking with the fediverse.

The bigger problem is when they start throwing their weight around. The W3C (and groups like Mozilla) have had many strong battles with Google trying weird stuff because they're the biggest guys in the room (e.g., FLoC).

As long as we can rally behind the loyalist FLOSS geeks, we'll always be alright.

[–] Phileosopher 1 points 1 year ago

That's not entirely true. Plenty of FLOSS software exist that are also run by corporations.

The secret is that corporate FLOSS maintainers are "service providers" and make their living that way, but the code is a public-access creative output that allows others to render that service.

It's a somewhat implicit contract of saying "Live and let live, since I'm technically have more power strictly because I designed the darn thing." Sorta scratches the ego and also allows freedom for everyone else at the same time.

[–] Phileosopher 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The trouble with socialism, though, is that any implementation of it strips away meaning in the process of trying to help people.

Meaning comes from a person feeling responsibility for what they do. That responsibility requires exposure to risk if they don't act.

Almost any policy created to help people without a well-guarded limit will quickly become paternalism and, consequently, strip away meaning.

[–] Phileosopher 1 points 1 year ago

Can you define "socialism"? I'm a little lost on how any social media with a hosting provider or moderator can ever be socialism.

[–] Phileosopher 1 points 1 year ago

Technically, anything can be scraped (e.g. Internet Archive), but that doesn't mean it's interactive.

I'd say the volatility of computer data means someone could theoretically nuke it whenever they want, though there may be remnants on other instances.

I'm curious enough to enforce Cunningham's Law: It's not on blockchain, so it's deleted if the instance is deleted.

[–] Phileosopher 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right wing? Money is a pretty nonpartisan matter.

Most of the right-wingers have already fled off to Gab, MeWe, or Mastodon.

[–] Phileosopher 1 points 1 year ago

They kinda already are. The problem is finding new volunteers to cover them.

This is basically on the level of a church or homeless shelter disrespecting their volunteers. NPOs only thrive on the contributions of random people investing their efforts, and a social media platform has some parallels to the model.

 

I love the weird one-off internet: those tiny little fan projects made by someone with a true passion and something in their mind that's probably hard to pronounce.

Any fun corners of the internet out there still beyond social media? Or do you build anything yourself?

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