Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town
- Future new account
- @joepie91@slightly.tech
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
In the process of moving to @joepie91. This account will stay active for the foreseeable future! But please also follow the other one.
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
@f0x must post more
@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)
@schratze Yeah it's basically just an integration problem, kwallet having no way to wire into the OS auth system and verify that you're supposed to be able to access it that way
nl pol, police violence
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!)
why cohost is problematic (long) 
@apisashla Actually yes, we *should* be doing everything that's reasonably possible to prevent co-optable power structures.
why cohost is problematic (long)
@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.
why cohost is problematic (long)
@CymechDraws @aeva@mastodon.social Indeed they're different people entirely from the two cases I've mentioned - that's also the reason I originally decided to make this post, to try and *be* part of that collective memory and show people that this sort of governance model has been tried before and it didn't go well, and why
why cohost is problematic (long)
@CymechDraws @aeva@mastodon.social Oh sure, I don't disagree that there are issues with the fediverse as it stands - both reputational and cultural - and that those need to be addressed.
But "creating another locked-down silo with an abuse-prone power structure" just isn't how you solve that problem, that just exacerbates it.
why cohost is problematic (long)
@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.
why cohost is problematic (long)
@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
why cohost is problematic (long)
@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.
why cohost is problematic (long)
@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
pol
@schratze @sofia@chaos.social It's also worth noting that it's actually *capitalism* that disregards scarcity - there is no real concern for resource exhaustion, it's just "grab what you can grab before someone else does".
Either there are enough resources to provide for all, or there are not; and if there are not, then you need to consider what the different ideologies are *really* presenting as the solution.
Communism: aim to distribute these resources as equitably as possible
Capitalism: distribute these resources to whoever is the wealthiest, ie. is at the top of the hierarchy, and deprive the poor of them
Basically, capitalism can't magically solve a potential scarcity problem just like communism can't. Capitalism just tries to distribute it unevenly enough that a small group of people (those in power) can *pretend* the scarcity problem is solved.
Ultimately, aiming for equitable resource distribution isn't "disregarding scarcity" at all - it's explicitly acknowledging the possibility of scarcity, and ensuring that we deal as fairly as possible with what we do have.
- Future new account
- @joepie91@slightly.tech
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
In the process of moving to @joepie91. This account will stay active for the foreseeable future! But please also follow the other one.
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
