Kichae

I can't wait for the future where we're paying subscription fees for a thousand separate essential services and the libertarians start suggestinf thet there should just be a service that provides a single source for paying and managing all of tjose subscriptions.

This is how you get people whining about there being 8 different "Politics" groups, and insisting they should be allowed to erase the identity of the hosting website.

The patchwork nature of the fediverse is baked into the technology. If people don't at least have a basic model for how it behaves, then they're just going to get pissed off at it and leave.

Ypu don't need to know how an internal combustion engine works to drive, but you have to understand how driving works, both from the perspective of operating a car, and from that of the conventions of the road.

"Just find a pretty car and hop behind the wheel" is bad advice for everyone.

This is jsut kind of what happens if you dip into random posts on thr global feed. There is a mix of generalist Lemmy sites that expect people to behave like they're on Reddit, and everything's just a free for all, and insular sites that are focused on a narrower community, operating more like independent forums.

Stepping into one of these spaces, and treating it like a big, open one is going to get you tossed on your ass like you're DJ Jazzy Jeff in an Uncle Phil convention.

You need to be aware of what community you are engaging with around here, because it might not want your participation. That is not power tripping, that is just being unwelcoming.

"apartments built by thr public or coops" is right there. Don't look at a package proposal and treat each part of it as unrelated or judge it in a vacuum.

And what, exactly, are the long-term problems? The most common one I've seen sited is that they don't maintain properties, but there are solutions to that. Economists just don't seem to be willing to discuss anything that isn't some kind of private market solution.

"We can't do anything that reduces landlord or developer profits" is trying to solve the problem with both hands tied behind your back and a ball gag firmly in place.

Oh no. I don't be needin' no internet enabled legislation! Good, old fahsioned, airgapped legislation was good enough before, and it's good enough today!

This doesn't sound like you're trying to thoughtfully engage with any community on the network, and are, instead, wanting to mindlessly optimize the reach| ofr whatever it is you're trying to slap your user name on.

My thoughts are, decide who you're engaging with first, and treat each Lemmy community as a community, not an audience.

Has an MBA ever contributed anything of value?

Now, include the environmental costs of some of these tools, and whether they're a) running at a loss or not in order to gain market share, and b) whether they're the tools people are even using.

Do we still come out ahead? Are the minutes saved - if there are truly any - actually saved, or just shoveled onto someone else's plate as environmental damage?

What's the big picture here? Because society honestly should not give a flying fuck if your job becomes slightly easier at the cost of everybody else.

The ruling class, against whom the internet was a critical tool in the name of democracy, decided they were not going to let us have that tool anymore.

All prohibitions do is create a space where kids are doing it, but without any discussion about the risks. It's the abstainance only education model, or the "war on drugs" model.

It doesn't work, especially when the "authorities" are doing it anyway, and they're not even quiet about it.

The drive to be a parity product with centralized social media keeps the biggest platforms on the fediverse looking like knock-offs of the most popular commercial platforms that "don't work right". Mastodon being "distributed Twitter" is always going to be limited, because distribution is complicated, jankey, and kind of confusing. And because someone is always going to make a new, centralized, corporate Twitter replacement.

The fediverse cannot win on ease-of-use. In a straight comparison, it's never going to be easier to use. Even if it becomes quasi-centralized (which has been the trend), there are a lot of highly active users who are on alternative platforms, who will never end up on masto.soc or the .worlds.

The current paradigm -- which is mostly being driven by Mastodon, AFAICT -- is platforms with bundled-in default web clients that lack any meaningful customization. There seems to be little selection of, or appetite for, custom themes, and 3rd party clients remain similarly utilitarian. There's very little way for site admins to present any kind of character or set any kind of tone with visual elements. This appears to be purposeful, as it's both a way to provide value to the 'Mastodon' brand, and to encourage the genericization of any given Mastodon-based website, leading to the impression that they're completely interchangeable, and commodifying the thousands of independent small social networking and media sites that make up the fediverse.

As attempted parity platforms, the question of "which server do I sign up on?" is nonsensical. From the end-users perspective, if this is emulating centralized social media, it has already failed. If there's no meaningful distinction between nodes on a homogenized network, I shouldn't have to make this choice. It's weird I'm being asked to do something.

On the other hand, if the fediverse is construct of independently operating small social spaces that just happen to be able to cross-communicate, then there's no reason for them to all look the fucking same. But then we can't "market" "Lemmy" or "Mastodon", because Lemmy and Mastodon are not discrete and containable things like Twitter and Reddit are. They're technologies that power liminal spaces, like Apache HTTP Servers, or WordPress installations are. Imagine trying to sell the World Wide Web to people by having literally every website on it look exactly the same, and trying to get them to 'join Joomla!'.

We can't market a hundred large, generic Lemmy instances, each with c/Politics, c/News, c/VideoGames, etc. on them. We especially can't do that while trying to hold it up as a singular Reddit clone.

The fediverse is not centralized social media. If it's going to have real value and staying power, it's not going to look like centralized social media.

It can't.

It will just get eaten alive by the next shiny, proprietary, VC backed social mobile app if it tries.