comfy

I hope they keep Alex Jones’s communism financing operation going.

No contradiction. Law is a dumb basis for deciding what you like and don’t like.

Also consider not having an economy where our jobs dominate our lives.

There’s plenty of studies, videos and anecdotes discussing how despite technology becoming more and more efficient, we work more hours a day in the Industrial era. Most of the older culture we consider traditional didn’t come from the media industries we see today, they came from families and communities having enough time to spend together that they can create and share art and other media relevant to their own lives.

(although given the decentralised framework of the fedi, I’m not sure how that could even happen in the traditional sense).

It’s possible to dominate and softly-control a decentralized network, because it can centralize. So long as the average user doesn’t really care about those ideals (perhaps they’re only here for certain content, or to avoid a certain drawback of another platform) then they may not bother to decentralize. So long as a very popular instance doesn’t do anything so bad that regular users on their instance will leave at once and lose critical mass, they can gradually enshittify and enforce conditions on instances connecting to them, or even just defederate altogether and become a central platform.

For a relevant but obviously different case study: before the reddit API exodus, there was a troll who would post shock images every day to try and attack lemmy.ml. Whenever an account was banned, they would simply register a new one on an instance which didn’t require accounts to be approved, and continue trolling with barely any effort. Because of this, lemmy.ml began to defederate with any instance which didn’t have a registration approval system, telling them they would be re-added once a signup test was enabled.

lemmy.ml was one of the core instances, only rivaled in size by lemmygrad.ml and wolfballs (wolfballs was defederated by most other instance, and lemmygrad.ml by many other big instances), so if an instance wasn’t able to federate with lemmy.ml, at the time, it would miss out on most of the activity. So, lemmy.ml effectively pressured a policy change on other instances, albeit an overall beneficial change to make trolling harder, and in their own self-defence. One could imagine how a malevolent large instance could do something similar, if they grew to dominate the network. And this is the kind of EEE fears many here have over Threads and other attempts at moving large (anti-)social networks into the Fediverse.

Almost all of my creations which I share (mostly code and visual art) are entirely volunteer work. Community culture doesn’t cost money. Entertainment does not need to be a job, even if it must take time and work.

Of course industrial large feature films cost full-time money. But I don’t come to online communities for that.

The upvote/downvote button is not a [] petition for making a problem go away by disagreeing with it.

Unfortunately, in a material way, it is. Downvoting a post is a way of lowering its visibility on the platform.

I’m not complaining about it being crypto - I prefer crypto over credit card payments for online stuff. On the other hand, any monetisation of online communities leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I came to Lemmy years ago to get a step further away from for-profit internet treating me like a customer. Root of all evil, and all that.