Your reasoning touches on a deep philosophical concept: what is “ownership”?

I’d say owning something is easy enough when you can’t duplicate it (I can’t just copy your car or house to save money). Duplication, however, means the ownership is technically the abstraction of “intellectual property”, which worked fine when duplicating cost money and people paid money for it.

However, the very essence of using a computer on a network is simply using copies. You’re not reading this as I write it, but a copy your computer downloaded.

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.

Can you define “socialism”? I’m a little lost on how any social media with a hosting provider or moderator can ever be socialism.

Technically, anything can be scraped (e.g. Internet Archive), but that doesn’t mean it’s interactive.

I’d say the volatility of computer data means someone could theoretically nuke it whenever they want, though there may be remnants on other instances.

I’m curious enough to enforce Cunningham’s Law: It’s not on blockchain, so it’s deleted if the instance is deleted.

They might flee into the rest of the world and learn social skills. The horror!

This will be funny how bad it’ll go. I expect ridiculous blocking coming.

Then come the AI bots who comment…

This plays out like things I’ve seen in real life:

1. Get a community/club/church/workplace going with a good set of leaders.
2. The system becomes unwieldy through bureaucracy, excessive rules, whatever.
3. Leadership can’t change it, so they storm off in a huff after nobody listens to them.
4. Power-mongering Assistant to the Regional Manager takes their shot to run the show.
5. Everything becomes awful.

In all fairness, that’s how Twitter did things from what I can understand.

Of course, that can be quite the payroll expense, especially with a weird model with a panoply of interest-based domains.

I’m sure the Reddit employees will be up to it and has all the equipment necessary for it. That protest was about the amazing internal tooling the mods loved using, right?

You’ll always have to rely on someone else, unless you build the thing yourself.

The beauty of the fediverse concept is that it’s about as easy as possible to build it yourself.

The cost of running a host is a matter of economical management:

• It costs almost nil to run text-based content.
• Images take a bit of memory and bandwidth, but are even manageable with an old cellphone under a set number of users.
• Videos are a major drag, and very expensive unless you’re embedding them.

Most open-source is funded as passion projects by devoted geeks who typically already make a living doing other computer things anyway, and fediverse is a bit of the same.