Comment on Mastodon Exit Interview
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 week agoYou can argue all you want about definitions, but that doesn’t change the fact that these companies are at the wim of the large oligopolies and pose absolutly no threat to them, nor do they even want to because their business indirectly depends on these oligopoles existing.
rglullis@communick.news 1 week ago
Why? We are talking about FOSS and services based on FOSS, here. Do you think that Google would be able to successfully shut down small email providers without repercussions?
Why is that relevant? I do not particularly care about eliminating the large corporations, at least not from the start. I’d be more than happy if we could grow this ecosystem here to become a sizable share of the overall market.
I’d rather work towards a world where Facebook has “only” 70% of the market to themselves and the rest of us foment a healthy economy sustaining the other 30%, than to keep this delusional idea that a scrappy bunch of nerds are going to be able to take Lemmy/Mastodon/PixelFed/Matrix/XMPP to the mainstream by wishful thinking and “community” alone.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
Many of these email providers only exist as a less bad alternative but compatible with Gmail etc. And the oligopol could shut them down any time as their primary service is sending emails to the oligopol.
What you are proposing is basically to make the Fediverse a small managed opposition to Meta’s Threads, which I am sure Zuckerberg would love.
But that is not what the Fediverse tries to be and neither does it aim to become mainstream. We are doing prefigurative infrastructure building here. If people want to join, great. If not, also no problem. But if society decides to finally get rid of this capitalist hellscape, then the Fediverse will be there and ready to use.
rglullis@communick.news 1 week ago
I disagree about “the primary service” of a minority provider. The minority provider can do a lot more than just “send” emails to the larger share, and I think they can be instrumental for us to bring a tool from the intolerant minorities to the mainstream.
I also disagree about the idea of “managed opposition”. “Managed opposition” is what Mozilla does to Google with Firefox. They are paid by Google to be kept around. I am not saying that we should take the Fediverse and seek funding from Threads, or for us to depend on Facebook.
Finally, I have serious doubts that this “prefigurative infrastructure building” is effective. To me it seems like just a collective of aimless rebels who want to keep this universe secluded from everyone else, but it’s just too afraid to say it out loud.
Anyway, thanks for the chat. I understand I won’t be able to change your mind, but to go back to the original topic: I just wish that next time we don’t see someone as “toxic” just because they were not willing to put up with all these silly rules and rituals that everyone seems to follow without question.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
Something, something Chestertons fence…
These “rituals” are vital for the continued existence of the Fediverse. Without a clear anti-capitalist and anti-oligopolist stance it will be co-opted and destroyed like many similar efforts that came before. You are being very naive if you can’t see that.