Capitalism as a classification/concept did not exist does not mean the practice did not exist. Capital (both in kind and in mind) accumulation has been occurring since even the stone age. Of course we would not call those societies capitalistic.
Plus I am replying to the comment that tries to dismember science from finance/economy.
So are you saying, after the New Deal, the US was/is no longer practicing capitalism? I am afraid I have to disagree.
The US government did not produce all the technologies. Many of them are from private companies. Yes the government funded them with public money, public money paid by the taxpayers.
Yes so we need to understand it. You don’t think our countless historians and social scientists are doing their work purely for fun or do you?
And please enlighten me on where the resources come from and how they are allocated. Do the coal/oil/gas buried deep under earth dig themselves out or the cattle/pigs/chickens will automagically grow and serve themselves on our dinner table? Command economies can only work spontaneously. The Nazi and the USSR both did have made spectacular achievements over the course of their existence. But is the process sustainable? No. That was why they both failed eventually.
The US did not become the arsenal of democracies by centralizing all the industries during the second World War. The private industries involved a lot. You can say that paved way for the future military-industrial complex. Even the secretive Manhattan project had a number of corporate partners.
“Improving things” is not a justification for ignorance. I have never seen things getting “improved” by someone ignorant of the building blocks or even worse motivated to destroy the building blocks on which we all stand.
Science cannot exist without finance. Science and its practitioners do not exist in a vacuum. Who are going to feed the “scientists”? Or who are going to be the “scientists”? It takes time and resources to train “scientists”. It also takes time and resources to ensure knowledge is inherited and shared. That is why renaissance and enlightenment is such a big deal in history.
Most folks have taken things for granted for too long. Throughout the course of our history, we human have never been wealthier, healthier, and happier. Our stomachs have never been more filled. People have forgotten how we get here. It is not dynastic empires, Soviet Republics, nor facist dictatorships that bring us the quality of life we all enjoy. It is rather tragic to withness the spread of the anti-capitalism ignorance.
The main reason is that libtorrent, which is the literal backbone of most torrenting clients, has implemented supported for I2P only recently in its latest v2.x branch… It takes time for libtorrent to iron out bugs and stablize and it takes more for clients to upgrade their embedded libtorrent to v2.x.
A selfhost option: Bitwarden frontend with Vaultwarden backend.
The case with XMPP is that Google Talk introduced addons and intricacies that were unique to them. So they could federate with you in full with additional bells and whistles while you were stuck in an eternal catch-up. They presented a better alternative regardless of the eventual defederation. Even if we have some viral clauses as in GPL in open-source software that ensures protocol compatible software to be compliant, we can only do that to a certain extent plus enforcement is always an issue. Who are going to spend the vast sum of money in court to defend the “federation”?
This aside, enforcing federation alone does not ensure decentralization. These zero-marginal-cost fixed-cost-intensive businesses of the internet has a tendency to centralize as serving one more seat costs no penny plus one more seat diluates the fixed cost altogether.
Basically the sequence of events as claimed by the author is that:
This demonstrated exactly the importance of reciprocity. If they play dirty, kick them out asap.
I wholeheartedly share the worry of rug pulling but we have to dance with the devils aka evil corps one way or another as we have no mean to eradicate them. As long as the goals aligned to a large enough extent, the alliance should still be accepted despite the unholiness.
Meta’s platform(s) supporting ActivityPub can potentially give us a leverage. If they do honour how the system works and be reciprocal, it means they no longer monopolize the content (from which most values to us the users are derived) on its platforms. So if another Reddit madness happens again, valuable contents created would have been (or could be made) distributed across the fediverse already. That would make migration much easier. Just a change of URL and business as usual for most people. Of course you may say I am being overly optimistic here but there is no point in being pessimistic either. The whole Thread thing is still a rumour after all. Maybe it will never see the light of sun.
While Meta’s platform is having access to the value created in the fediverse, aren’t we also getting access to the value created on their platforms too (of course unless you deny there is any value there)? Recipiocity is the true differentiator here in my opinion.
For software, I think we need a more complete package than that to truly unlease the fediverse. Maybe an easy-to-use application (a la an email client or a bittorrent client) that allows prospective users to spin up an instance and feel the magic themselves. Otherwise people are just crowding into a few major instances and eventually the scaling problem will show up again. If we are going down that route, we should also consider incentive model(s) that makes thing sustainable. Lemmy is an open source software but that also means the developers are unpaid. But surely I applaud any idea that attempts to reduce the barrier of entry to the fediverse.
Indeed as you said defederating is a built-in feature of most if not all fediverse networks. I have no opinion against that. Your server your rule. You can do whatever you want with it. Just like what Reddit does to it’s APIs.
But I suppose you are supporting a manifesto, aren’t you? I believe you want to be heard and to persuade others to follow suit. If that is really the case, you and your comrades are doing a real poor job.
The Thread thing is not out yet and we don’t know whether it will really be out or not. There is literally zero detail to discuss. And your arguments revolving Facebook aka Meta’s “bloody” history have demonstrated exactly that.
I see it the other way. These giants joining and thus enabling the mess joining alone is value added to the fediverse already. We have to admit most people do not give a shit to the fediverse, selfhosting, open source, bla bla bla. For them they just want it to work despite the latent costs. That’s why selfhosted blogs gave way to blogspot.com and eventually Facebook and friends.
The self delusion and confusion demonstrated in this so-called response piece is so insurmountable that I truly feel pity for you. Mixing a bunch of related yet independent concepts and ideas does not help make a strong argument. You may gather more support if you just outright admit you are being anti-corporate. Btw in case you are unaware ActivityPub is a standard from W3C of which Meta is a member lol
We have a mixed system. But we are capitalistic leaning are we not? Being capitalist or socialist are not discrete choices, but a continuous scale. I agree with you on that.
Btw the 1929 great crash was facilitate and exacerbated by lax Federal Reserve control of money issuance and the drastic tightening after the crash. This is actually an argument against centralized money.
Well a joint stock company also does that. It engages in production. It does redistribute wealth. For a long time, public services e.g. firefighting, were provided by private entities. Is it socialism? I don’t think so. It has to involve coercion, say, via monopoly of violence to be socialism as it is a form of governing.