Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@maya I'm assuming that this is referring to eg. the Twitter thread about "Mastodon is bad, actually, because some people are dependent for their income on begposts or commission posts and those can't get enough reach on Mastodon" (which I still heavily question whether it's actually true)

Update: State of emergency declared in Apeldoorn, as farmers have put out a call on social media to storm the police station and jailbreak arrested farmers (yes, the cops did eventually arrest *some* people!)

@apisashla Actually yes, we *should* be doing everything that's reasonably possible to prevent co-optable power structures.

@apisashla Considering that they are constructing a closed silo under centralized control using leftist/activist language while not actually implementing the corresponding ideology: yes, I do in fact think it is necessary to call this out early, *before* it can do harm.

You'll notice that nowhere in my original post did I accuse them of malice. That was deliberate. I can believe that this is naivete. But *that does not make it any less harmful*, and harm needs to be called out. Not just left to fester until it's too late.

@apisashla So I've looked into the non-profit LLC thing a while ago, in the context of a very similar situation. There were indeed supposedly "non-profit" LLC forms, but crucially they were not actually held to any operational standards to ensure that they actually were non-profit in the common understanding (like *does* happen for non-profit incorporation forms elsewhere), and it's generally very easy (too easy) to 'flip the switch' to an explicitly for-profit form.

From a quick skim, I can't find anything in that article that contradicts that, though please do tell me if I overlooked something.

Regarding trust: yes, it is correct that you are always investing trust in some people. The problem with a non-interoperable platform like cohost is that you don't actually get a choice in *who* to trust - the governance is directly tied to the entirety of the platform's userbase, no different from Twitter or Facebook. You do not really have a choice.

That is what is crucially different about federated networks like the fediverse - you get to choose for yourself who you invest your trust in, *without* immediately breaking your entire social life.

@aeva@mastodon.social But cohost can do the exact same thing? That doesn't solve this. If the problem is "no governance at all", then select an instance that *does* have governance?

The point I am trying to make here is that a locked-down centralized platform is *strictly worse* from an abusive-power-structures perspective - anything that cohost could be getting right in terms of governance, would also just be implementable as a fedi instance *without* the issues of cohost

@aeva@mastodon.social But then why would you trust a small service that doesn't even let you migrate to something else without totally breaking your social contacts? Because that is a strictly worse version of the same thing.

@aeva@mastodon.social There are plenty of fedi instances with pretty much the same policy though (mastodon.social is not one of them), and those *aren't* built on a fundamentally abuse-inviting governance structure like cohost is.

It doesn't really matter how "morally good" people are - if you put them in charge of a hierarchical power structure, things will eventually go wrong, and avoiding such situations is crucial

Okay, so let's talk about this cohost thing for a bit.

It sounds great on the surface - a small-scale, worker-owned, sustainable social media platform, run by some trusted people! Great, right?

Not so much, unfortunately. If you click through a bit, you'll find that it's run by "anti software software club llc", which claims to be a "non-profit software company". Except that's legally false (LLCs are not non-profit), and practically very unlikely to actually work out like you might think. In reality, it's an unaccountable power structure, and one that is bound to end in disaster.

They're not the *first* to do this - both YourAnonNews and npm (the JS package registry) have a very similar origin story. A small hobby project by some activist-minded people, trusted by the community, incorporated into a for-profit legal form to keep the lights on, promising to always keep serving the community. Of course, there's a reason I'm mentioning them - both of these projects turned into large unaccountable power structures that ended up doing far more harm than good, and significantly damaging a movement.

They scaled up, and whether through naivete or otherwise, the founders were unable to continue acting in the best interest of the community and broader society. Both of them became a blight on their respective communities, actively interfering with the efforts of others in that community to right the ship.

But they'd grown "too big to fail", too big and closed-down to replace or disavow. They ended up *controlling* the community rather than serving it.

A company is not a community. It is hierarchical; it has owners, employees, people with a specific role who decide how it gets run. This makes a worker-owned company a decent option when the decisions being made only affect the workers, as there's good representation.

But... that is not what's going on here! There is *no way* in which a worker-owned company can accurately represent the interests of a community of people *who do not actually work there*. Worker-owned companies are not magical fairy dust that guarantee equity and representation. You need actual community governance structures for that.

So... cohost is problematic. It is a power structure which is prone to abuse (deliberately or otherwise), not accountable to anybody, with no proper community governance model nor any real room in its incorporation form to *create* such a governance model, it is a proprietary and closed system that does not interoperate with other systems, and most worryingly of all it is a platform that becomes more valuable as it grows.

In other words: all the ingredients for a perfect storm of power abuses and harm several years down the line. Whether you personally trust the founders doesn't really change that - it's set up for failure from the very start, even assuming the best intentions.

As an activist community, we really need to do better on this - recognize such problematic power structures *before* they grow big enough to cause widespread harm, and encourage people to select governance models that *don't* suffer from these issues.

@kuba @DeveloperMemes In fact, almost every cookie/consent popup currently in use actually *violates* the GDPR...

The marketing industry has been depressingly successful at spreading misinformation about the GDPR (not helped by the EU sucking at its own communication on this point)

@riley@toot.site Ohh is it one of those old rounded ones with a tiny LCD and a weird 1D joystick on the corner?