@freakazoid "Companies haven't been particularly successful fighting against copyleft legally."

This is an incorrect metric - you are judging the effectiveness of the mechanism by its theory of operation rather than its goal, and *of course* it is going to succeed by that metric, because you're measuring it against itself.

But the goal here wasn't "making it difficult to fight legally" - the goal here was to ensure user freedom, to guarantee control over one's own devices, and to prevent co-optation. The legal mechanism was just meant to be the way by which that was enforced.

It's been several decades now, and I think it is safe to say that this strategy has failed miserably: DRM everywhere, live services, everything is a subscription, GPL violations in embedded devices are extremely widespread, and devices are ever trending towards being more *closed*.

There are two major factors that have contributed to this, and both directly derive from the capitalist nature of copyleft's foundations (namely, copyright and the legal system):

1. Being in the right legally is worthless if you don't actually have the money to enforce that in court - and the offending parties are almost always the one with money, whereas the aggrieved parties are the ones without.

2. Copyleft is a legal hack, and its scope is constrained by what the law allows for, which isn't very much; and so almost all of the ways in which corporations enclose the commons *in practice* (anticompetitive measures, everything-as-a-service, EEE, etc.) are actually entirely out of scope of what copyleft even *can* do.

This is what home advantage looks like - a counterstrategy that hinges on the legal system that serves the wealthy, is never going to defeat them.

"Rather, their goal is to disrupt attempts to build communities outside of capitalism. And one could argue that that's capitalism's primary tactic: alienation."

Sure, but notably people have an intrinsic craving for community - and so the only way that capitalists *can* do this, is by taking advantage of inaction on the side of community builders. It makes capitalism a thing you need to actively defend a community from, but that is not a thing that happens in the vast majority of communities.

That doesn't mean it isn't possible - it just means you need to recognize it as a threat, and not expect it to sort itself out. If you build *and maintain* a robust enough community, there is nothing capitalists can do about that.

"It's a definite weakness, but exploiting it requires anticapitalists to do a far better job than we've been doing of embracing diversity."

Absolutely. This also directly relates to what I said earlier about people just copying the capitalist things - very few anticapitalists seem to even realize that they *need* to be thinking outside of the (capitalist) box, and shed its assumptions. It's a long-standing problem, and IMO one of the main reasons the movement has been ineffective in practice.

"Dealing with that would go a long way toward showing that there's a chance we can do it with larger, more complex scenarios."

Yes and no. I feel like you're treating 'ability to organize' as a static value here; like a skill at a fixed level that must be proven to demonstrate that you deserve to try out the bigger challenges.

But that's not really how it works - organizing is a collective skill, and like all skills, something that needs to be built up through practice. You don't start with the messy cases, you start with the simple ones and gain a foothold from there to understand and deal with progressively bigger problems.

I would not say that fedi is a "simple one". By this point it's large enough that it's quite difficult to cause ecosystem-wide change, and so I think treating it as a "you must solve this before proceeding" really just harms any ability to learn that skill, in the same way you can't expect a beginning programmer to successfully build an MMO.

In other words: we need to start *somewhere*. It doesn't matter where.