meta, power imbalance
I think that what bothers me about the "there's a power imbalance between who can host an instance and who can't and that's why fedi is unsustainable" argument, is that it doesn't acknowledge that *this is true for every alternative too*.
This isn't a problem of Mastodon or fedi specifically. It is a problem of technology in general, a problem that even predates computers. It holds true for any infrastructure that involves technical complexity. Once it becomes a specialization, there's a power imbalance.
Even if you just look at social media sites - how is this any different for Twitter, Cohost, and so on? There's still the same admin vs. user power imbalance, just now you don't even get to choose who is the admin, and there's no real accountability because the cost of leaving is social exclusion.
I'm not convinced that this problem (of power imbalance in technical complexity) is actually solvable, and I also don't think that it's a useful *goal* to try and solve it - it feels to me like the same old 'rugged individualism' in a new coat of progressive-sounding paint.
The more useful goal here would be to *acknowledge* that those power imbalances exist, and try to erase or at least minimize their impact through building healthy communities and trust relationships. Not by replacing it with a centralized silo that has the same problems but worse.
(And no, P2P isn't a solution either. There's still a power imbalance between developer and user there.)
re: meta, inherent power imbalance associated with technology
This power imbalance used to exist with the written word. There was a scribal class who worked for the king / oligarchs / church and no one else could read and write. I see the programmers of today as a sort of modern-day scribal class.
But in the past, we did eventually reach mass literacy. It didn't mean that everyone became a linguist or studied calligraphy, but it did change the world dramatically. A lot of stuff had to change for that to happen. There was a sort of "meeting in the middle:"
On one hand, the written languages were dramatically simplified so they were easier to teach, easier & cheaper writing tools were developed,.
On the other hand, a lot of effort was put into education so young people would be trained enough to achieve a passable/legible fluency.
I don't know if the same thing can exactly happen with software, considering how much more complex computers are compared to written language, but I believe that something similar *can* happen, and just like with the history of mass literacy, it's going to require work on both sides: both education and simplification.
And like you mentioned, a good architecture for trust/transparency is going to help a ton when trying to apply this idea to computers and software.
re: meta, inherent power imbalance associated with technology
@forestjohnson I'm not sure I'd agree that we've ever actually reached that point with literacy either. Two things that immediately come to mind:
- Your writing implements are going to be manufactured by someone else, and very few people know how to manufacture writing implements that are equivalently practical/durable. And that practicality matters, because...
- Just because "everybody is literate" it doesn't mean that everybody is *equally* literate. Even if you ignore the practical factors like writing implement quality, in today's society there are *vast* differences between eg. people's ability to convincingly argue, their access to publishing, and so on.
I would say that there absolutely is still a significant power imbalance on matters of writing and literacy; the baseline is just high enough that it's less obvious.