cakeistheanswer

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.

I've seen the cubs win the pennant and gwar talk to/about Terri Gross. Expecting horsemen any minute for the checklist.

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.

Thank you!