That’s historical and can be traced back to how it was formed: some of the people were coming from the instances perspective, where a bunoh of people congregate and network, some from the individual website perspective where you can do absolutely anything and everything you want, you’re home after all. So it landed somewhere in the middle: some very basic use cases were laid out, every platform did whatever they wanted and tried to fit the basic use cases in. Now we have independent platforms doing what they want and if we’re nice we can, maybe, talk with others.

It’s a sad state but some platforms, like emissary and bonfire, are trying to go beyond and offer the possibility for anyone to build their own interface on top. One should also defocus from mastodon and look closer at the friendica family of software which have always looked at fulfilling many usecases, so compability can be better than others

Capitalist propaganda is rampant on the fediverse. We need to discuss ways to combat this. Most big instances -generalist, tech or something are wholly controlled by bourgeois people who would rather uphold state violence than democracy. What do you think?

Your analysis is too light. The state isn’t some magical benevolent entity which is somehow “on the wrong path”. The state is an instrument of domination driven by the dominating class: the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is against everything you cited. It will not slowly act against its own interest, willingly lose power and dominance. It will always fight for, at the minimum, keeping power.

That is why historically the only way to have changes that contradict the dominating entity’s interest is for the dominated entity to band together. It’s the only way anything ever changes: the balance of forces moves in the interest of the dominated. Women didn’t earn the right to vote because men were nice, but because women fought for it. Social progress never happens because the bourgeoisie is nice (that’s a very nice propaganda trick) but because the bourgeoisie has to compromise.

Waiting/wishing/hoping for the state to be nice, which is what asking for ubi is, and the “revolution without violence” the socdem has pushed about, never works. As long as the people who are legitimate are dominated, it will not happen.

Let’s stop dreaming in idealistic what-ifs and act in materialist actions. The material conditions define our existence. Let’s set our material conditions of existence, without asking nicely, and the balance of power will force the dominating power to compromise.

Be the change you want to see. You want the right kind of content to magically come to you, how do you think this content exists in the first place

Yeah but “decentalised” here is not clear. Do you mean a storage that is not controlled by the instance ?

Centralized where ? Each instance is autonomous and independent

I’m curious as to what is wrong with funkwhale ? It does have issues but it also seems to fit your usecase

Society isn’t fate. It doesn’t come out of nothing. Accepting/keeping the status quo is accepting the balance that exists, and it’s been going right for a dong time.

It’s not just about what you can or can’t do, it’s about where you’re pushing to

You must care about money in a capitalist world, of course; the real question is do you want money to matter all the time or not

A more interesting way is to understand that there is a difference between what is and how it affects us. The point isn’t so much to decide whether gravity exists or not but to make sure it doesn’t impose any unfair weight (ha) on some members of the society and not others. When we say “it’s just exists” we’re very close to say “there’s nothing we can do about this” and that justifies unfair situations.

Going against bilionaires is going pretty left though

Caring about money is taking a side though

The mastodon api, or the lemmy api, or the xyz api. Eagh platform has its own. Being public doesn’t make it standard, hence the “proprietary” qualifier

Yeah if you want to do the same community it’s going to be harder, but if you want to make your own community with your own content and views it’s different.

Also, the history of the internet contradicts your point, communities have moved servers since the beginning, there never was a unique central point for everything. Lemmy is a bit inferior here because it only allows you to see communities one by one, but piefed can group communities into feeds that you can directly follow. By not placrng focus on a single one piefed can push for much more diversity

That’s because AP as it is implemented today is crap, it’s a superficial compatibility layer on top of a proprietary (as in, doing non-standardized stuff) platform. We need to take it on its head and make AP the actual core then build on top but that requires some work

Pro-capitalism garbage is putting me off, yet is everywhere. I like that it’s different, not everyone wants the same things

I like that communities/instances have opinions and go in a direction. That’s what make decentralization useful rather than one big average thing that always pushes towards the status quo in the end. Make your own community with your own rules without all-powerful overseers, that’s a system I believe in

No, I’m taking the data as it exists on the API …

We can see a globally slowly downward trend, probably not good but I’m definitely not equipped to analyze that

Then again if it’s some guy in his corner doing stuff on his own, is it really a community ?