Bummed to see some folks outright rejecting and even blocking investment-backed players of the Fediverse. The Fediverse can't just be the artisanal cheese shop of the Internet if it means to serve all humans. Gotta try various things. Plenty of opportunity to block and route around later based on actual bad behavior right? That's the point of federation, i think?
@ben I dunno, I don't much like how the Internet I helped build turned out, so I'm open to investigating the hypothesis that the problem was at least partly in the financial assumptions.
Turns out that Fediverse stuff is pretty cheap to run. So why not run it on the cheap with co-ops and suchlike, without key players being in a position where success is 1000X ROI and anything else is failure?
@timbray @ben This is where I am. We thought making the internet friendly to business and investment wld make for a better world. So we enforced intellectual property, limited liability, tax-advantaged VC + employee stock options, etc. Look where we are. The less commercial internet we thought we were improving on was much better thn this brave new world created by the commerce we prized. So it’s time to undo the work of making the internet so friendly to commerce, at least to commerce at scale.
@interfluidity @timbray @ben I was never under any illusion that the internet wouldn't eventually be controlled by capital; and I'm sorry to say the same will inevitably happen here. Money is just so damned loud!
@OliverC @interfluidity @timbray @ben
The difference is, since anybody can spin up a small Fedi instance for a few dollars a month, when money talks *we don't have to listen*. We can set up co-ops or single-admin home-hosted sites that talk to whoever we want, and when the few monied players push in, we can just say no.
When GoDaddy tries to roll out their centralized "secure ActivityPub" or Google launches their half-compatible fork, we can just route around and ignore them.
@silvermoon82 @OliverC @interfluidity @timbray @ben
Just like we did with email?
@ben
We made mistakes with email, we let big players take over, set the rules, and eliminate the competition. They've successfully made it basically impossible to run one's own email server.
When Mozilla or Cloudflare or whoever does something approaching evil, we need to as a community turn our backs on them until they shape up, then let them back in. Fediverse is still our sandbox, we have a chance not to repeat our past mistakes.
@silvermoon82 @ben it’s really weird to say “the big players” have made it impossible to run one’s own email server. Spam, and the complex responses necessary to battle spam, made it impossible to run one’s own email server.
@luis_in_brief @silvermoon82 @ben
I have, I can honestly say, been running mail servers on and off since some time in the mid-nineties. As I am today. It was never impossible.
What would make it hard would be the lack of static IP address, or access to rDNS. Anything that would prevent one from obtaining such is unequivocally a "big player" decision.
