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

@freakazoid The answer to "why it isn't happening already" is actually pretty simple, IMO, and it is the same answer as for the rest of society: because kyriarchy is the norm.

This is true in FOSS circles too; FOSS absolutely is not progressive, despite the nominally ideological roots of it. There's no understanding of intersectionality, of the broader issues with kyriarchy, how non-tech politics relate to it... the vast majority of FOSS folks see it as 'just a technical choice' or at best a very restrictive notion of 'freedom', including in copyleft circles.

As for "what do we need to jumpstart it": create explicitly inclusive environments for developing projects. Rust has done this to some degree (but had the disadvantage of being the first really high-profile attempt to do so, and got a lot of abuse for it).

It needs to be clear *from the start* that marginalized perspectives are prioritized, that development choices center around people's diverse needs, and that the price of admission to the project is to accept those principles, and they are not negotiable.

Very few projects do this (Lix comes to mind as one of the few). Most projects are scared to take such a step, believing it will 'drive away contributors' (due to those same internalized toxic beliefs that marginalized folks cannot be competent and thus the privileged and bigoted folks are needed), and so instead adopt a much more superficial or pseudo-neutral stance, which doesn't address the problem. And that's how the problem perpetuates itself.

In summary: create an environment that is safe for marginalized folks (note: this requires having solid conflict resolution mechanisms, not just banning people!), and provide people with the resources they need to make things happen. That's probably going to include funding.

@smveerman Ah, I've used those with Beat Saber every once in a while; my limbs always feel weirdly lightweight afterwards, it's odd how quickly one's body adapts to such a weight change 😅

@mynameistillian Probably*

* subject to ADHD

@freakazoid "I don't think we're going to convince people who are motivated because they want to have a specific piece of software themselves to make that software more usable for others."

Certainly, but they're not the people I'm talking about. I'm talking about the people who *already* have "building software for others" as the goal, but misunderstand the requirements to make that work in practice, often because they do not respect a diversity in needs.

"Threads has gained some power, but not really over instances that will never federate with them. Taking over Mastodon itself would be much harder to insulate oneself from."

Not really; it could be forked off (there are already several actively maintained Mastodon forks!) and people could just avoid the proprietary thing.

These scenarios really are functionally indistinguishable, and the reason is that the value of fedi isn't in the code; that's just a means to an end, relatively trivial for a company to replicate.

The value is in the community, and the power over it, and crucially, Eugen *does* have that in a highly centralized manner, and that's the primary cause we have this whole Threads mess to begin with. The code was never the issue, but that's the only thing copyleft can apply to.

@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??