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"Welcome, I'm the CEO of email!"
Really, it should be kept more like an overplatform or protocol like what the email is. Luckily, Lemmy has the roles of developers and content admins so separated and decentralized that it shouldn't become a corpo-danger from now on
When we think CEO we need to think “shareholders.” Including potential shareholders as in Reddit’s case. I think sometimes we are so focused on our feelings about a “big boss” that we forget the CEO is merely an avatar for the investor point of view in a business. They answer to the board of directors who represent or are even made up of shareholders, and they are usually paid in such a way to motivate shareholder benefits, like with stock instead of a high salary.
And when we think “shareholders” we need to think “loan money.” That’s how you get to be a shareholder. You plunk down some cash to float the business.
Therefore, to really be CEO-proof, an entity needs to be fiscally independent and never need an advance of cash to keep going. It must be entirely bootstrapped, paid-as-you-go, with no one standing to gain a whole bunch or lose a whole bunch by its failure or sale. That’s kind of a lot of needles to thread when you’re building something big. It can be done but we have to know what game we’re actually playing and not get distracted by “fuck The Man” sentiments. This is about cash.
So who actually owns the server this instance runs on? Doesn't it just mean they do whatever they want? So confused
There are a ton of Lemmy instances that all communicate with each other and each instance is ran on hardware by different owners. So if one instance goes to shit your account will still work on all the other ones.
So if one instance goes to shit your account will still work on all the other ones.
My understanding is that (at present anyway) since accounts are not federated, your account on that "gone to shit" instance will be gone. Your content will still be on many federated instances, but not your account. That would be lost.
There will never be a time when you need adds to pay for a server even if you had a server with 50 million people the cost to run that server might be like 100k if just 1 million people pay 1 dollar you already have 1 million dollars a month you only need adds when your a company that needs to grow every quarter
CEO-proof sounds pretty, though there already exists the (perhaps broader) term “decentralised”.
My only concern is extremists making use of it to organize, spread misinformation, coordinate attacks, etc. and there's zero oversight. That's a serious concern that needs addressing, but I have no idea how.
Ban those communities from your instance. There's not going to ever be any way to prevent them starting their own, all you can do is defederate. There doesn't need to be any more.
I mean, if it's real bad shit like violence, that's where FBI comes in, right?
Not sure if the ACLU would be able to do anything about hate speech.
But bad actors would have to run a shell game of go between instances to recruit. And they've been doing that shit for decades anyways. Hell, it's the same thing as under 18 punk shows back in the day when nazis hung in the parking lot trying to give booze/drugs to kids.
Like, imagine if someone said we can't have phones because assholes can also buy a phone...
One day the lemmy could just go closed source and sell to a company.
If they went closed source that would mean they would have a similar situation to Emby. They went closed source after a time which gave rise to people forking the last public build and making Jellyfin which is an excellent alternative.
Protocol is open, anyone can rewrite a federation client that pulls data off proprietary servers as a last resort. This is why federation is great. Besides, you can't close an open source project, you have to create new, closed parts to have them. That's how mariadb and galera took a chunk off mysql user base and how libreoffice became a successor of openoffice.
As a side note, I wish we could move accounts and even communities between instances, based on some kind of two way handshake agreement.
I agree that the more accurate term is "board-proof" but I still think "CEO-proof" conveys the idea better to someone who is unaware of the way social media corpos work. The image of the shady CEO with his pinstripe suite and greased hair, lighting his big cigar with a wad of dollar bills is so strong in the cultural conciousness, that even my inlaws would switch to a federated plattform.
sweet summer child
We do have a term for that, it's a little bit of a trigger-word for certain demographics, but the correct term is socialism.
The largest (at least well funded) socialist organization in the world is the US military...
If everyone got the shit I got as a disabled vet, we'd all be a lot better off and the only negative would be rich people have a slightly lower high score that's 100% irrelevant to how their quality of life is.
TL;DR: Yeah, I 100% agree, if everyone had a strong safety net, we'd be much better off.
When it works it works. I mean I have met several people who've expressed a lot of sincere dissatisfaction with the VA's medical services, including limited access to mental healthcare among other things. Particularly of concern is the high degree of veterans who end up on the street--many with severe mental health issues, with some even self-medicating and/or dealing with addictions.
Of course, I'm sure there are more factors that contribute to homeless veterans than limited accessibility to medical care, mental healthcare, and other social services provided by the VA--but it is important to consider.
..and of course, as you are aware, it's better to have those social systems in-place than nothing at all. Even when run to a degree of mediocrity, socialist programs can and do tend to benefit a population. While not everyone may like the Supplemental Security Income and FAFSA programs: without them, I wouldn't be able to attend a university as a future job-seeking student.
Specifically without SSI, many who are unable to pursue a degree would end up homeless and hungry, becoming a greater burden on society. In my opinion, it's unfortunate that you have to have a disability in order to qualify for this safety-net program; as I know several people who turned to less favorable means of providing for themselves, because they were rock-bottom and didn't qualify for any programs.
So, yeah, the VA program, and many other programs in the US are great examples of both some of the harms, but also the significant positive benefits that socialist policies can have for a population. Indeed, the greatest harms done by socialist programs in the US seem to be caused by their limitations and inability to properly serve enough people. Providing a everyone access to a solid safety net would do wonders for us as a society and for our economy.
The trouble with socialism, though, is that any implementation of it strips away meaning in the process of trying to help people.
Meaning comes from a person feeling responsibility for what they do. That responsibility requires exposure to risk if they don't act.
Almost any policy created to help people without a well-guarded limit will quickly become paternalism and, consequently, strip away meaning.
There are many successful and beneficial implementations of socialist policies that do more good than harm, especially outside of the US. Most government institutions in the US and abroad are fundamentally socialist in nature--and some of them work very well (especially outside the US).
While there was once some truth to what you've said, I think you're gravely over-simplifying the nature of what gives humans meaning and purpose in life. For one, it's an extremely subjective topic, but for example, what gives me meaning has very little to do with the relationship between non-action and risk. Rather, things that have meaning for me are things I enjoy doing, and things I enjoy seeing. I don't enjoy the thought of going out to hunt for food with hand-tools at the risk of hunger or death, maybe some people do--and if that gives them meaning, that's fine, but that's not how we need to live our lives.
Yes this I agree with, limits are everything. Where limits are designed is important. What I am discussing is not a program that would guarantee that everyone is capable of going out and buying a yacht. I am discussing social safety-net programs that ensure equal access to comfortable housing, enough food, good medical care, and the means to comfortably pursue a job, education, or business endeavor--and in addition, take care of those who are unable to care for themselves. At this point in our technological and social development as a species, these should be considered basics that can be guaranteed to everyone. To do this would not strip away the meaning of life, rather it would enable people to feel meaning in life and the foundation to build up greater meaning for themselves.
Some of the greatest threats to human health and life come from needs-based anxiety, and with the declining population growth rate, high degree of depression, and high rate of suicide, it's imperative that we re-frame how we think about and treat each other.
You’re posting this on lemmy.world. The owner of this instance, the biggest new instance, is literally building out a business of instance hosting. If this goes well, and his business grows, it will have chief executives.
You could also totally monetize hosting and build a business around that. There are already several private projects to build lemmy clients.
With federated sites you won’t have one CEO. If it takes off, we’ll have many CEOs. Trust me.
In the Fediverse there are no Zuckerbergs, Musks, Dorseys, Huffmans etc.
There is ALWAYS the possibility to enshittify anything. Meta is trying to infiltrate Mastodon already.
One issue that I don't think Lemmy has tackled collectively is the licensing of the user data. Lemmy is open source and that's one crucial part of the enshittification resistance equation. The other is doing the equivalent for the user data. If the user data is licensed under the right version of the CC license, it will ensure that it can always be copied to another instance in cases of instance enshittification. As far as I know, there isn't anything about who owns the user data. That defaults to every author having copyright over their data. While this means the instance owner can't sell it without permission from every user it's also not conductive to moving bulk data across instances. Individual migration would improve this significantly but I believe we should switch to having user data licensed under some CC license too.
If all of this sounds strange, think Wikipedia. That's what guarantees data contributed to Wikipedia stays within our hands irrespective of what the Wikimedia Foundation does.
This is a great point. The user data needs to be enshrined in such a way that it can be easily moved in a bulk migration without requiring a direct opt-in from every user. While at the same time making it clear how it's being used/kept/sold/not sold/etc.
I'm not against LLMs using the data generated on sites like this to inform useful answers when I ask ChatGPT a question. It genuinely makes AI a better tool, but I feel like the contributors of such content should know how their answers are being used.
Not true. Email is basically owned by like five companies today. They just block every new host that tries to come up
It's not not true, but I get your point. It's hard to build an ip-block reputation anyway so the emails you send from there are actually delivered. Much less with others (Microsoft looking firmly at you) with their super aggressive email shitcanning.