Mastodawn

Andrew (Television Executive)Nov 18, 2022

Here's your irregular reminder that:

Twitter was a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees.

Mastodon is a niche hobbyist product run by volunteers

The fact that we're being seen as a viable alternative to them is an admission that a federated, decentralized future is not only possible, but desirable.

Mastodon is not one thing, or one place. It's a network of many things and many places. We don't have a spokesperson (I mean, there's me. I'm the official spokesperson for 💯 of the fediverse, but beyond me there is no spokesperson) we don't have consensus on moderation or blocking or tools or what is good and what is bad. Some of us are professional SREs and Sysadmins, some of us aren't. Some of our instances have been around for 5+ years, some won't be here in six months.

And that's good! All of it, every last bit of it is good.

We're wrestling power away from the billionaire class, in real time, and reclaiming it for the People.

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Andrew (Television Executive)Nov 18, 2022

We're wrestling power away from the billionaire class, in real time.

This is bigger than some technical standard.

This is cultural, political, and economic.

We represent an existential threat to the business model of some of the most wealthy corporations on the planet, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let anyone take that away from us without fighting against it with everything I have.

We are standing on the precipice of a transformative shift in the way we, as a society, relate to one another through the internet.

We are moving away from a Broadcast and Toward a conversation.

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Andrew (Television Executive)Nov 18, 2022

This is mutual aid, this is anticapitalism, this is collaborative ideation.

We are living revolutionary values, right here, right now, on a silly little social media network.

And I will fight to my last breathe any God Damn corporation that tries to Monetize that.

This is the future, and you're a part of it now. Be a good steward of the future.

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sj_zero Nov 19, 2022

I don't know that being against billionaires and corporations is
necessarily anticapitalism (private control of capital is what gives us the freedom to create our own websites), but besides that point I agree with everything you've written.

These megacorps have gotten too big for their britches, and they've forgotten we don't actually need them.

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Andrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022

@sj_zero I'm pretty sure that being against the capitalist class is the definition of anticapitalism.

Maybe your definition of capitalism differs from the common one, and somehow has grown to include all forms of ownership and commerce?

Websites wouldn't stop existing under socialism, and it's foolish or wildly misleading to pretend otherwise.

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sj_zero Nov 19, 2022

Capitalism is usually defined as the private ownership and control of capital, as opposed to cooperative or state ownership and control of capital.

In my view, you don't need corporations to have capitalism. One of my more radical views is that we should get rid of corporations entirely, and then the owner of a thing would be personally responsible when their thing breaks things or people or the environment instead of letting a legal picture of Dorian Grey take the heat.

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Andrew (Television Executive)

@sj_zero banning corporations from existing sounds an awful lot like an anti-capitalist stance to me, although going hyperindividualist route instead of a collectivist route at the end sounds counterproductive, but if it gets us to a world where the workers own the means of production, I don't much care.