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

@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.

@wmd@chaos.social https://askubuntu.com/a/138010 ? (Assuming Xorg)

@silvermoon82@strangeobject.space Wait. Two??

@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.

@strypey Because yes, if you participate in that, and you go and act all high and mighty because of how you are doing Super Important Political Work, people are absolutely in the right to *personally* call you out over that intensely shitty behaviour.