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John Gruber Doesn't Know What He's Talking About
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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I think that the objection "is it about openness or about anti-corporate" is interesting, but ultimately it's a bad question.
For me, it is actually about being anti-corporate, because I am aware that corporate internet platform are structurally incapable of building a system which includes the set of properties that are the key values of the fediverse. Ultimately, this means that openness is the goal, but anti-corporate stance is the mean (or one of) to achieve it.
We have seen this over and over again, the big corporates that serve VCs first or shareholders later simply participate in a system that does not have the economic incentive to maintain the system open, or ad-free, or not monetize the users or their content, or to interoperate with other platforms, etc.. There might be cases where some of these are possible, but not all of them.
So, at the end, I would say that the answer to that question is 'both', and I am not afraid of an explicit anti-corporate stance, because this is not grounded on prejudice, it's grounded on an (subjective and ideological, of course) analysis of the history and the current state of the cyberspace.
I think the problem about the discussion is that there is a false dichotomy being pushed that if you don't like Facebook, you are "anti-corporate", thus you are a socialist, thus you are a Stalin-sucking tankie.
I'm not "anti-corporate". Corporations are a great tool when used correctly. The problem is that Wall Street owns Big Tech, and it's a great tool in their hands. Ask yourself the question why Wall Street might be interested in getting an "in" to the Fediverse.
And to be honest, it's not hard to be specifically anti-Facebook when they have enabled multiple genocides and have served as weapons in an information war against most of the democratic world.
Ahah, yeah, this might probably be the underlying narrative. However, I don't concern much with this, as if someone has this opinion, I already know there is no point in having this debate.
I am, generally speaking, but definitely I am when talking about the cyberspace. The reason is quite simple: the economic interests that big corporations have, where billions of dollars are at stake are straight up against my interests. Essentially everything they need, damages me. The need to foster controversy (which is proven to increase engagement), the need to create addiction, to commodify every single thing possible (data, actions, preferences, etc.), to lock-in users into their platforms. All these are not decisions based on the corporations being "evil" but it's the only business model that the Silicon Valley (home of the "disruptors" and cradle of innovation) came up with in the last 20 years. The sole fact that the business model relies on advertising, causes all of this. This is why I think that corporations are inherently incompatible with the way I think the cyberspace should be, which is "not commodified". Unfortunately this is by nature conflicting with what the corporations have to do to survive in this system (I don't even want to attribute malice to them).
This said, I am not against for-profit by definition. In fact, I would be extremely happy if a bunch of people around the world make co-ops or even small or individual businesses to run, maintain and develop Fediverse software. I would be very happy if these people can make this their full time job (hence, earning a profit). However, it is clear that the business model cannot be the one that the corporations use.
Technically, even a corporation could change the business model, and I would even accept that, I just think it's really, really, really, really unlikely in my opinion.
I think the list would be so long that I would need to open a PR to bump the character limits for comments.