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   simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Jul-2023 10:52:20 JST simsa03

   • scribe
   Reading your post I come to ask: Why do you think the #Fediverse (and/or its instances) is (are) an anti-capitalist endeavour?
   
   Obviously the Dear Leader of Mastodon is in for some deals with Meta, but that is only the visible tip of iceberg. To me, the Fediverse is a capitalist endeavour through and through, only that most instances and their admins never figured out a way to monetize their projects. And so, as they see much effort put into it with little returns, they start to think they're the landlords of their houses, with tenants to boss around or to evict when they deem some rowdy behaviour to be enough. Not to mention all the blockwars and defederations thus effectively creating sub-diverses of mutually exclusive instances.
   
   It's is exactly because the Fediverse is a capitalist endeavour in search of a way of monetizing that the rude and at times brutal behaviour of many is the substitute for the money. "If I can't get money, then at least I want ego. More ego. More..."
   
   At best the Fediverse is a sparetime project of many who like to tinker. But to think the Fediverse is in any sense a countercultural or even anti-capitalist project ignores how much the addiction of many to play with their screens is the result as the continuation of the capitalist project called "the web".
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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Jul-2023 12:21:06 JST simsa03

     in reply to

     • scribe
     @scribe
     ... at least the Fediverse is the perfect place for e-begging sites. #MutualAid they call it when there's nothing "mutual" in it at all but only one-way money-pulling.
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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jul-2023 01:01:11 JST simsa03

     • scribe
     It's my impression that the diagnosis of "feudalism" is a new fad, attached to everything that formerly was capable of attaining the label "class". Feudalism, that is, is far more a poltical concept than it is an economic one. (There is a reason why this term turned up lately in the description of the authoritarian rule of Putin in Russia.)
     
     But be it as it may, I think you're right in pointing to "exploitative-capitalism" although that sounds a bit like a pleonasm to me. I think, "extractivist and externalist capitalism" is more to your line of thought and I think this indeed is something that can serve as distintion between Capitalism and whatever defines the Fediverse. To me, although the Fediverse shows capitalist traits, it doesn not show or tries to reduce being extractivist and externalist, i.e., it doesn't want to put the burden on someboy who is not benefitting from the gains.
     
     That doesn't mean that the Fediverse is free of exploitation and/or authoritarian behaviour, but at least it doesn't want to move into the extractivis and externalist direction. So perhaps "communality" is still the therm that distinguishes the #Fediverse from #Capitalism proper.
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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jul-2023 01:15:05 JST simsa03

     • scribe
     Well... remember how Canonical in 2006 managed to scale "bigly"? Give a shiny polished Linux distro and delegate all fixes and user care to the unpaid "community". That was exploitation, and it happened in the Open-blah-blah-world. So yes, I think that the onus is the other way round: One needs to show that communal projects are not exploitatie in order for them not to count as something neo-liberal and capitalist. (The best example for neo-liberal capitalist exploitation in the Open-blah-blah world is still Wikipedia and Wikimedia and their exploitation of free labour in order to amass content that big tech companies can use for free in their fee-based products.)
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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jul-2023 02:52:31 JST Evan Prodromou

     • scribe

     @scribe @simsa03 LOL.