If the goal is solidarity and community, creating a world where little feudal lords reign over independent territories and negotiate the terms of the interchange of ideas can hardly be the best answer. I very much understand that in times of rising authoritarianism such an escape into decentralised resistance is alluring to progressive political movements. But this is a temporary fix at best. It is not a progressive vision for what comes after. Decentralisation without social institutions that debate, define and – when necessary – enforce fairness and equality is a euphemism for survival of the fittest.
Imagine Mastodon had a governance system where all users, admins and minorities were equally represented. Imagine this system intervened in the practices of some admins. Right now I can only imagine the Mastodon community to react with an outcry about such an audacious attack on their free and decentralised kingdom. This reaction would be completely in line with libertarian impulses that are so very present in all things digital. Cyberlibertarians routinely invoke the “free internet” as a vague supreme ideal that has to be defended against any kind of collective, democratic governance. Their ideology is based on private control and decentralised market-based exchange. It has no use for community, solidarity and participation. It is founded on contempt for democratic intervention, a belief in the unique nature of the digital realm and the superiority of those controlling it. These ideas are very present in the Mastodon community as well. Most often this is not the result of an active ideological commitment to libertarian or right-wing views. It is, however, very open to being instrumentalised by these ideologies and it is reinforcing them – willingly or not.
This is basically an article arguing for a fedi equivalent of the UN.
It feels like you’re glossing over the problem. If the lemmy.world admins start oppressing furries, for example, very few people are going to migrate away from lemmy.world to replacement communities on pawb.social, they’re just going to remain on the anti-furry lemmy.world communities, which will continue to grow and disenfranchise furries, and most users probably wouldn’t even notice the problem.
It’s all well and good to say “you can just spin up your own instance and create whatever communities you want”, but if nobody is going to read my posts and comments I may as well post them into a sewage drain.
I would imagine that in this hypothetical scenario furries would be able to move to a new instance and keep reading their own posts without further interruption. If they wouldn’t move then they weren’t a community and just a bunch of random people. Then again I’m a person to build a vampire castle and keep posting into the void because too much popularity is annoying.
Sure, the furries can do that, but that just creates essentially segregated communities, and there are far fewer furries than non-furries. It really feels like you just want to pretend this isn’t a problem, but I’m not sure why
I understand now that this is probably not a hypothetical scenario but I still believe that no instance owner owes a service to anyone. Thankfully we’re using a communication protocol that allows us to continue talking even if LW banned our accounts right now.
I’m not arguing that instance operators must be compelled to host communities or users they don’t want to - just that the centralization of communities is a big issue for free speech and expression. I’m saying that we should acknowledge the problem and work to mitigate it.
Agreed.
Interestingly enough this is something that later Dune novels touch on a lot.
God Emperor of Dune spoilers
Leto II had to put humanity through millennia of abuse for it to learn that dispersing is the best form of resisting tyranny.
I feel that we don’t have necessary tools to change nature of humanity but I’m happy we have Fediverse.