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

@jwildeboer @libreoffice@fosstodon.org Fucking hell. Them too?

@smhoekstra I'd argue that the problem is fundamental to companies of *any* size - just, like in any hierarchy, the ones lower in the hierarchy are not *yet* at a point where they can actually exert their power. But they are certainly vying for it, and it doesn't mean that they can't do a lesser amount of damage in the meantime.

Every big company started as a small company at some point. The problem is structural to the concept of a company itself.

@stragu Gee that sure sounds very, what's the word, centrist

@smhoekstra While there are quite a few issues with the concept of "psychopathy" itself, there are pretty strong arguments for companies (in the for-profit sense) being *fundamentally* like that, even.

As in, their entire purpose, their reason for existence, is to function that way where people couldn't/wouldn't get away with that. As a sort of unaccountable decisionmaking machine.

Likewise, capitalism is a fundamentally hierarchical system, for-profit companies are fundamentally designed to be capitalist, and therefore they are fundamentally strongly hierarchical - they *have* to be to fit into that ideology.

That's also why I'm arguing that companies can never be genuine community participants. Their primary priority is always, by design, to act selfishly.

@fuchsiashock Answer from someone elsewhere (permission to share, but requested to keep it anonymous):

"We've been considering separate logins but don't really have a reason to right now. One of my headmates has a separate phone but mostly because she has different sensory needs than the rest of us. We removed the haptic motor from that phone so it's safe for her to use"

@thufie But only when your locale is en_US, otherwise it's an angry printer beep

@ratwerks @jtolio@hachyderm.io Then, as I have exhaustively repeated by now, they should be prepared to be defederated from the existing community, and that should be the end of the conversation.

@MerlinJStar@weirder.earth Oh, huh! I never knew the second definition existed. Seems like an odd definition considering the word "math" :)

@scattermoon@mastodon.social This will of course vary by where on fedi you are, but at least in my general circles I've not really seen any issues with this - there *is* a general expectation that you CW heavy/negative personal stuff, but I've also not seen people get bothered when they didn't/couldn't CW it for whatever reason.

Personally: I'm totally fine with negative stuff behind a CW. If it's not overwhelming, then it's also fine without CW. I do usually unfollow or mute people who are almost *only* negative without a CW, to avoid getting sucked into a spiral myself - that's nothing personal.

(Separately, there's an ongoing conversation about whether lived experiences of bigotry and particularly racism should be CW'ed; I don't personally think that should be *expected*.)

@leo @whatanerd That I can agree with. But I also don't feel that the *exact* failure mode is terribly relevant for whether we should want to avoid it...

@MerlinJStar@weirder.earth Wait, isn't that exactly what the term means? Or do I have the wrong definition in my head?

@x4nw @scanlime At least the anarchists are generally honest about the reason, though...

@leo @whatanerd (Also: the reason they seem out-of-place in this list is because they're being listed at the *start* of their marketing process instead of at the end, when all the consequences have already played out, like for the others. They're included specifically because of the conversation about Hachyderm right now.)

@leo @whatanerd That doesn't really change my concerns, though. The *core service* is proprietary, as is their infrastructure, which is the actual thing that constitutes their company. A separate open-source server implementation is a side project, one that may be axed at any moment, that doesn't necessarily have the same featureset, and so on.

*All* of the companies I've mentioned had similar things. High-profile FOSS projects meant to demonstrate that they were "a friend of the open-source community", except they actually weren't, and it was just marketing.

In fact, npm was at one point even entirely open-source! But later closed up their registry implementation.

Ultimately, it is about power dynamics. The exact shape of those power dynamics varies from company to company, but "for the 'real first-party' experience you are dependent on Tailscale the company and their proprietary system" is absolutely one such power imbalance.

And ultimately, no company will do *exactly* the same thing as the ones that came before it. It's never exactly identical, it's always "different". That makes it all the more important to recognize the underlying *patterns* instead.