@freakazoid Thanks for mentioning it, re: the first part :)

"I do think, though, that you may be underestimating how good capitalism is at coöpting any efforts to dilute its power."

I don't think I am, or more precisely, not to a degree that invalidates the strategy. I'm sure I'm not aware of every fine detail because nobody's understanding is perfect, but I've spent a lot of time identifying the weaknesses of capitalist systems, and I do have some history of beating capitalists at their own game (the most recent example being my involvement with the Freenode/Libera thing).

The problem I see with how a lot of people approach "fighting capitalism", is that they try to use capitalism's own ideas and mechanisms against it - but that's never going to work, because capitalists have home advantage there. This includes every "exact copy of <thing that exists>, but anti-capitalist" project. Those are doomed to get coopted.

But capitalism also has its weaknesses. Capitalist organizations are, for example, notoriously bad at building genuine community - they can try to emulate it, but their communities are always *at best* a shallow facsimile of the real thing, and people notice. Likewise, capitalism is bad at diversity; it needs an aligned, hierarchical strategy to function.

This opens up a number of axes along which capitalism can be fought; by building genuine community, and by doing so around projects that would be inconceivable in a capitalist environment.

An imperfect but easy-to-explain example would be youtube-dl/yt-dlp; a corporation would never be able to profitably maintain such a diverse set of support for different sites across the world, which is why it could only succeed as a community project and everyone else just slots into yt-dlp.

Likewise, corporations are very bad at adapting; they are slow to do so, and due to internal pressures often have to fit into a legacy mold. Fast-moving targets are hard for corporations to keep up with, and relatively much easier for community projects.

IMO, the key to a successful capitalist project that is difficult to co-opt, is to approach it in a way that is really only viably doable in a collective, community setting.

That requires thinking out of the box and trying new approaches, instead of the 'tried and tested' ones (which are almost always geared towards "what works for corporations", which is what we *don't* want).

"I think that while developers do bear a lot of the responsibility for OSS being "for nerds", a lot of that also comes from capitalism filling the "usability niche" and crowding out open source, if that makes any sense."

It does, but the blame for that IMO still squarely lies with the FOSS community. There is no reason FOSS software *can't* fill that niche, the barrier to doing so is a widespread culture of victim blaming; I've lost count of how many fruitless discussions I've had over the years with FOSS devs, trying to convince them that usability is even a thing they should be caring about.

This very closely relates to the toxic pseudo-merocratic (and in many ways mysogynist) culture of "how good you are at writing code decides whether you really belong here" - this has very often driven out the exact people who *would* have contributed towards better usability, because writing code wasn't their thing.

"If it weren't for the AGPL, I bet we'd already have a commercial fork of Mastodon with a bunch of usability and moderation features thrown in. That company would now "own" the Fediverse."

We already do, the platform is called Threads, and the company that owns it is Facebook, with the blessing of Eugen. The AGPL certainly hasn't stopped them from carrying out their takeover.

It's a very good example of how copyleft doesn't at all address the *actual* real-world cooptation vectors, which are social/hierarchical in nature, because the end result of this is basically indistinguishable from them making a proprietary code fork.