‍fuchsiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa @f0x@pixie.town

It's literally been like a week since I tooted about how project decisionmaking at a conference means gatekeeping, and now we have an online conference charging admission(??) on a proprietary platform(????) claiming to be all about "making decisions on how to move fedi forward"

This is not how community governance works, people

My wife jokes that showing off results is a core part of my development process because I won’t consider a task “done” until I’ve been showered with praise about it 😅

So please keep those faves coming 😂

@catzilla That's one of those things that really frustrates me - there's this often unspoken assumption that anyone who is anticapitalist must also be naive and incompetent at everything.

It usually manifests as something along the lines of "it's good to see so many industry people here, really educational" in response to employer-in-bio people showing up.

Or sometimes more explicitly, allegations towards anticapitalists that they "have no idea how it works in the real world" and so on...

(Also it boggles my mind how so many people *still* haven't caught onto the fact that "DevRel" is a marketing department, not an educational department)

So when I warned against Hachyderm and its corporate-friendly atmosphere a few months ago, several people expressed concern, and felt that I was seeing ghosts and that "just because companies are allowed doesn't make Hachyderm itself bad".

Then recently, the Hachyderm admin casually posted a thread where, aside from problematically using slavery as a debate prop, they mentioned that they intended to monetize Hachyderm and their "FOSS governance" thing, Nivenly - and that they are, paraphrased, a "reasonable capitalist".

And here's the thing: this isn't a surprise to me at all. This is *always* what happens with corporate-friendly "communities". Every single time. It always becomes a vehicle for profit, either directly or indirectly. That is what capitalism does.

When we warn against an instance that's corporation-friendly, that's not because of some weird conspiracy theories or whatever. It's because we've seen time and time again where that leads, and how it harms the most vulnerable people - and crucially, *why* that happens, even despite the (appearance of) best intentions.

Instead of waving away our warnings as being "unrealistic", or "naive", or whatever this week's pejorative for anti-capitalists is, spend a moment to think about *why* we're issuing those warnings. Where they come from, what history they are based on.

Because I promise you that they aren't arbitrary, and that learning to recognize the signs will save you from a *lot* of ruined communities, and allow your communities to flourish like they couldn't before.

"Do not use slavery as a prop for your capitalism apologia" seems like such a simple rule to follow, and yet