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

@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.

@strypey That is not what I said. Have you actually paid attention to what's going on? With people suddenly having >$300k to spend on an already well-funded election campaign while their neighbours have been struggling to collect a couple thousand for months?

And then when this is called out, they get basically told to be quiet because they are poor and, paraphrasing, they are disrupting the Important Stuff by asking for help to not die? While being called all sorts of vile shit, because people do not want to see the poor people in their nice virtual middle-class neighbourhood?

@strypey Directing *what* money away from people in genuine need, exactly? The money you're implying people shouldn't send to anyone in the first place because "they might be a grifter"? That money?

Also, did you actually read the post I linked at all?

@freakazoid "Can't any concern be expressed as a need that the concerned individual simply won't accept is covered?"

Yes and no. That's possible in a literal sense, but preventing that isn't really the goal - the goal is to make it *obvious to bystanders* that that is what someone is doing.

Right now, it's too easy for someone to express vague non-specific 'concerns' about an accommodation for marginalized folks, playing into the rhetoric of the broader political conversation in society, and this is accepted at face value, because "someone is concerned and we should care about that".

This doesn't really work when you need to express things in terms of 'needs'; that requires being very specific, as to what the need for *you, personally* is - you can't handwave away the rationale, you can't play into existing political rhetoric, and this means that the need can actually be assessed on its own merits by bystanders.

As an example: "we should not allow trans women in women's bathrooms because women's safety" is a "concern" that sounds credible on the face of it, to a lot of people.

But when that is reframed as "I, as a woman, need safety in the bathroom", it invites asking in exactly what way that safety is currently not there, and "because of trans people" sounds like an obviously incomplete answer. It makes incomplete reasoning and rhetoric stand out. It also opens up room to say "it seems that the safety problems actually come from men".

Ultimately it still allows *making* bad faith arguments, that will always be possible, the goal here is just to change the circumstances so that defeating them is quickly done and takes little effort, as opposed to the usual pattern of "spending an hour explaining things to bystanders every time a troll spends 10 seconds throwing rhetoric around", which is how concern trolling sabotages discussions.

"Maybe just record the concern *as* a need (if it's expressable as one) and then require that anyone wanting to discard a solution in favor of another show how the favored solution meets the accepted set of needs better?"

That runs the risk of situations like "abled folks deciding what accommodations disabled folks need" (which will generally be accepted by the crowd) and similar things, and so would do very little to protect marginalized folks, who are the primary target of concern trolling.

@stapper @jalefkowit@vmst.io Given that it claims "end-to-end encryption" (that's not how any of that works!!) it's definitely being sent to a remote place *somewhere*

@freakazoid Open-source has a rather broader ideology than that; for example, quite a lot of folks are interested in it because it provides a public commons (something the free software movement does not explicitly aim for), and the possibility of it being used for proprietary software is just the price of admission to get to that point.

Likewise, my main interest for example is to make it as easy as possible for grassroots efforts to build competitive tech (as a starting point for sabotaging aforementioned closed systems), and some of the 'free software' choices like "burying people in lengthy copyleft licenses" are, to put it mildly, not helpful to that end.

All of which is to say, it's really a *lot* more complex in practice than "user vs. developer freedom", mainly because the "free software" movement bundles in a couple of different ideological choices that don't make sense for everybody (and arguably make sense for very few people, when the rubber meets the road).

As for where we go from here: that's a large question with a large answer. The technical starting point is, IMO, just about the least interesting part of that; sure, it needs to be figured out, but there are much more important questions to answer.

Like for example, how do we avoid building more 'software for nerds'? How do we avoid toxic culture (bigotry, "people will just have to learn how to use it correctly", etc.)? How do we make sure that accessibility is done right? How do we do decisionmaking to avoid the same problem again in the future? Can we make certain architectural choices to 'make a thousand forks bloom' more easily, so to say?

Arguably the first step would be to collect people who are interested in working on this, who understand the above and who, crucially, are open to considering needs and perspectives they had not thought about before (even when that means not doing it the way they originally had in mind). Then go from there.

@freakazoid It's the same answer as for anything else; find the weaknesses in the system, the points that you have a natural advantage on, and use those to sabotage those dynamics.

This is why it's so important to adapt the existing things and not only create new things; there needs to be a path forward for people who *aren't* willing to restructure their entire lives for a - what is to most people very abstract - cause.

That's going to be hard work, for sure, but there are no easier solutions.

And to be clear, I'm not suggesting that we adopt "providing access to business and learning big tech" as a goal; that's precisely the thing we're trying to get rid of. But that's a different question from "should we support the breadth of functionality that people have come to expect"; people have their own needs *separate from* those of businesses, that *also* cannot be supported by a stripped-down model.

Summarized, the intention is to accept and recognize the needs of individuals, but not those of corporations. That means rejecting some concepts, and accepting some others that we might personally dislike. It's a case-by-case consideration, but "minimalism" should not be the overarching goal, "meeting needs in a consensual and respectful way" should be.

(As for 'free software' vs. 'open-source'; that story is rather a bit more complex than how you've described it. The two ideologies are almost indistinguishable in practice, and "open-source" likewise has a lot of ideological history behind it beyond just "big tech". Neither ideology is remotely sufficient, and free software absolutely is not free of blame here either.)

@n8chz @freakazoid (Aside, I don't consider Gemini to fall under 'toxic minimalism' specifically because they actually recognize that they are a niche thing for a specific group of people, and they don't claim to be "all anyone needs")

@n8chz @freakazoid Gemini does not provide the features that the general public expects from the web and, crucially, does not intend to.

Trying to make Gemini the new Thing For Everybody would not be good for either Gemini *or* the general public, I suspect, and just lead to a lot of conflicts in vision.

@Shrigglepuss I've seen people complain about build quality but honestly ASRock motherboards are the only ones I've used that have never given me any trouble

@SynAck @eniko Also have an MX Ergo here and I'm already starting to notice switch degradation (as has occurred with every Logitech mouse I've touched for the past 15 years, and almost *only* with Logitech mice).

@freakazoid I think this is a reasonable idea in principle, but also something that is prone to takeover by primitivists and/or toxic minimalists if not very careful (with all of the accessibility and likely racism issues that that implies).

You'd have to ensure that there is a very clear answer to "what do we actually need from a web platform", *and* that the answer to that doesn't just come from white folks.