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this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Software isn't politics, and the fediverse is also the very definition of a free market. Nobody is stopping you from profiting from the lemmy or ActivityPub project, as you can see from Meta's interest in the project. I'm libertarian and I have contributed to the lemmy project because it interested me. I certainly don't agree with the creators politically, but I think they make some decent software that I want to be a part of.
If it is political at all, it's arguably anti-socialist because no instance has any control over other instances as everything is consensual. However, since everything is open, it does allow government surveillance unless you use a service like Matrix that's E2E encrypted (and even then, you'd have to control membership).
So no, it's not communist/socialist, it's just decentralized and federated. Software isn't political, so please stop trying to make it so.
I think you misunderstood socialism if centralized control was what you took from it. The are both centralized and decentralized varieties, the operation is in common good (or purpose). Most of the organizing principles at a microlevel you can find in non profits, co-ops etc, none of which demand any market conditions at all. Governments maintaining socialist claims often muck this up.
The phrase "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is definitely in line with the philosophy at play. There's not a lot of profit motive to be found. It didn't even have to be divorced from self interest since we all want a better platform.
I can respect a view that software is not politics, but the intentions to it are certainly wrapped in expression. Here the primary controllers were corporations of your bits and they are put sociocratically back in your hands like it or not.
But importantly you can't take your ball and go home. What you contribute here lives in a zillion caches.
Edit: 'r'
I feel like I understand socialism quite well. On one hand you have heavy top-down states like the USSR, and on the opposite end of the spectrum you have libertarian socialism as championed by people like Noam Chomsky (i.e. co-ops and unions in a pseudo-market economy). When I say "socialism" I generally mean the umbrella that covers both the former and democratic socialist states since both benefit from concentrating power into the hands of a few (e.g. look at how Western countries control information dissemination). Libertarian socialism just doesn't exist outside of universities, so I tend to discount it.
If you build it, they will come. Look at all the shilling that exists on SM, such as on Reddit, Twitter, etc.
In its current state, it's essentially a hobby project. I work on Lemmy-related projects because I find it fun, not because I'm trying to overthrow capitalism or anything like that. Likewise, I use Linux because it solves my problems better than other systems, not because I'm trying to rob Microsoft or Apple of a sale.
I consider myself a pretty laissez faire libertarian, yet my interests align with socialists. If you look around on lemmy, you'll find people from all stripes here, from anarchocapitalists to tankies, and everyone in between. The only people I don't see much of here are Trump loyalists and fascists, and I think that has more to do with moderation than the nature of the software.
And it just so happens that people from a variety of political leanings value expression, they just want to filter out expression they don't like. That's where moderation comes in. You can have polar opposite instances with the same high level goals, just very different moderation. Look at the difference between Lemmygrad and Exploding Heads, two very different ideologies using the same platform with very different moderation.
And that's what I mean when I say software isn't politics.
Inter-instance relations are ABSOLUTELY political in their own right.
For example db0 was/is working on some kind of add on to lemmy that would automatically defederate certain servers based on certain factors and a circle of trust or something (better explanation here https://dbzer0.com/blog/overseer-a-fediverse-chain-of-trust/ )
Anyway many of us admins were concerned about who controlled that system, how it could be abused, etc. it got pretty well, political, in the admin group chat.
In any situation where there's a power dynamic- it is political. Software maintainers absolutely have some degree of power.
That's not software being political, that's admins using software for political goals. That same web of trust (or whatever it is) isn't political, it only gets political when you choose who or what is in that web. It can be used to limit spam, or it can be used to silence opposing views.
A far left and a far right person could use the same software for opposite political ends. You can see precisely that with Lemmygrad vs Exploding Heads, both use the same software stack, the main difference is in the moderation. Lemmy itself isn't really political, it's just that the people admining the original instance have a certain agenda.
Some software is more compatible with certain ideologies than others (e.g. decentralized tools like blockchain is near useless for an autocratic regime), but even then you'd probably be surprised how your tool is being used (e.g. Tor was created by the US military, and now it's largely use to subvert law enforcement and international espionage). It just so happens that humans are really good at molding tools to different purposes.