One thing that I've experienced recently that felt very white on the Fediverse is how, when I was raising money to 3d print whistles for marginalized rural communities being threatened by the federal government, I had folk expressing concern about the plastic waste that I was causing.
Then when I asked later about 3d printing fidget toys that I might sell, I got nothing but positive replies!
I know it might not seem like a bias, but there is a *weird* bias here toward encouraging everyone to become middle class, and it actually is deeply entangled with the ethics of federation!
ActivityPub is often framed as “every person should control their own tech.” That sounds liberatory, and sometimes it is. But it can easily become: every person should control their own server, their own tools, their own data, their own reach, their own audience, their own shop, their own income stream.
From there, “technical autonomy” becomes “economic autonomy,” and economic autonomy gets interpreted in a very narrow middle-class way: everyone should earn and spend their own money as an independent market actor.
But that is not the same thing as mutual aid.
Mutual aid does not start from the fantasy that everyone can become a small sovereign economic unit. It starts from the reality that resources and needs are unevenly distributed, and that survival depends on communicating those needs across relationships of trust.
So when people are more comfortable with me 3D printing fidget toys to sell than whistles to distribute to threatened rural communities, that reveals something about the moral shape of the space.
The commercial project fits the ideal: I make a thing, I sell the thing, someone buys the thing, everyone remains an individual economic actor.
The mutual aid project interrupts that ideal: some people have resources, some people have urgent needs, and the point is not exchange but redistribution.
That is where the bias shows up. Federation talks a lot about escaping centralized platforms, but sometimes the imagined alternative is just a world of decentralized proprietors: everyone with their own server, their own brand, their own little shop, their own revenue stream.
That is not liberation by itself. It is capitalism with better protocol design.
...I'm not even going to talk about how often this place uses the mutual aid hashtag specifically for small businesses to advertise themselves.
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