Agreed on all counts. I recommend reading up on “enshittification,” popularized by Cory Doctorow. It talks about how online platforms become how you describe.

I’m hoping that we can avoid similar results via the mechanics of federation. We’ll see

Yes, this is what I meant. Thank you for making it clearer than I did

Right. Capitalism isn’t inherently bad. It encourages resources being put into new ideas and technologies, but if left unfettered, it can abuse the people operating within it, as we see now. This is similar to communism being highly vulnerable to low productivity and stagnation. It’s not a direct objective of the system, but it’s a natural consequence without some kind of outside force regulating it.

To be clear, I’m agreeing, but I’m adding focus to the balance aspect of things

Fediverse vs Corponet sounds great! But I wonder if we can go more along the lines of Right to Repair? Something like Right to Publish or Content Independence or something?

Corponet very clearly sounds bad, which is good, but Fediverse requires an explanation to a layman without generating interest, first. Laymen are interested in rights and independence, so I think words like that can act as a hook. I’m open to debate, too

Ah, thank you! Will edit now

As much as I hate all the work I’ve had to do to comply with GDPR, I love it. The EU did a good job with it

Hmmm… might have a new open source project to contribute to

Agreed. We need to treat this like OUR platform. It’s not the admins’ platform. It’s not the devs’ platform. It’s OUR platform. We create (or at least link) the content. I think that if we maintain this mindset, people will reject corporate attempts to inject themselves into our platform.

Edit: Not to say we shouldn’t appreciate devs and admins. See the thread continued

(Edit: I know the Fediverse isn’t only American, but these American companies are the ones fucking things up, so that’s where my focus is)

I know this was probably meant to be an innocuous comment, but I think this is dangerous thinking.

We’re in the current situation due to inaction and forces acting against us. The US populace stopped worrying about trust-busting. We assume that the current system is inevitable. We let our government not serve our needs. We don’t selectively place our purchasing and attention to promote good behavior of companies.

If we recognize that we can do something and we decide to work together, we can make things better. We can reject Meta. We can agree to not federate with them and pressure others to make a morale choice rather than a convenient choice. We can do this in other aspects of life, too.

We just need to make sure that we don’t let them divide us. We see this among the American population, dividing us based on issues that affect a tiny population and ignoring the things that could help us all, including those tiny populations. We let fighting over the optimal solution for problems get in the way of doing anything, even if imperfect, to at least improve things.

Let’s do better. Let’s unite. Let’s make it clear what results we want. Let’s make incremental progress (and giant leaps, if possible) towards making things better. We can’t just accept not having nice things. Let’s demand nice things, together.

Ahh, I recall using Pidgin, too. I think i ended up favoring it over Trillian. I already had accounts on all the services, so it worked out. I guess thinking about it, if only basic chat was supported, it may not have been terrible supporting everything

Oh man, I remember Trillian, too. That was great. Must have been a nightmare to build, though

Short for You Should Know, like the name of the community