☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ @ yogthos @lemmygrad.ml

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830

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998

Joined

5 yr. ago

For sure, it's hard to see any actual logic behind a lot of the atrocities that US commits aside from malice being the whole point.

I imagine the past 2 years where Germany has been cut off from cheap Russian energy are the most important.

Mastodon is definitely growing, and I see it from personal usage that it got a lot more lively over the past year. I think there's always going to be this ebb and flow dynamic happening where we get a wave of new users. Things get really lively for a while, than a lot of users become inactive, and things get quieter again. The dynamic does cause some intermittent issues, but the platforms do become increasingly more robust over time as well. For example, Lemmy was having all kinds of issues handling new waves initially, and over the past year it got a lot more stable. Personally, I'm pretty optimistic with the way things are progressing.

And a couple of articles showing how much growth happened recently:

• https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/mastodon-growth/
• https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/09/mastodon-actually-has-407k-more-monthly-users-than-it-thought/

For sure, there needs to be a conscious political effort to promote sound ideas. Simply having open source platforms doesn't magically solve that problem, but it is a prerequisite for having a voice. It's also worth noting that decentralization is perfectly compatible with principled organizing. The key is to work on building a common set of ideas and understanding across the network that's grounded in sound theory.

I think that slow and steady growth is actually a positive. I'd argue that the key part to focus on right now is sustainability. This involves having enough devs to work on the platforms, enough people who are willing to host them, and enough users to produce content. Once these three criteria are met, then the platform will stick around indefinitely. This is a very different dynamic from commercial platforms that need to find ways to monetize and grow to stay viable.

Mastodon now has millions of users, and now there are a bunch of other compatible platforms like Pleroma that all work on the same protocol and interop with each other. It's very much in the real of being indefinitely sustainable in my opinion. Even Lemmy with hundreds of thousands of users has likely passed the threshold at this point. So, I'm not too worried about rapid growth as an aspect of viability for the fediverse.

Meanwhile, the slow trickle of users means that new people end up adapting to the existing culture, and this is an important feature in my opinion. When you have a stampede of people come in from the mainstream, they bring the mainstream culture along with them and their views become dominant. We already saw this happening to an extent on the popular Lemmy instances after the Reddit migration.

I expect that we'll continue seeing more and more incidents happening on commercial platforms as they crackdown on political speech, and we'll be seeing more and more waves of people join the fediverse. And the bigger fediverse gets the more attractive it becomes since there's increasingly more content available.

TLDR here is that we shouldn't worry too much about rapid growth, and instead focus on making sure things are sustainable. The growth will happen organically over time.

I wrote an article back in 2020 warning against relying on privately owned platforms for creating communities and public forums. These companies are not accountable to the users, and they curate the content on the platforms in opaque ways that ultimately serve the interests of the owners of these companies. The same Marxist argument about workers owning their tools applies to digital platforms as well. We have to have software that's developed in the open, and that's hosted by volunteers, and funded directly by the community. This is the only way to ensure that our interests are represented.

https://justiceinternationale.com/articles/2020-12-02-we-must-own-our-tools/

I imagine they watched closely what Russia was doing after the war started, and would take similar measures when the need arises. I think China is also in a much better position than most countries because it has large domestic industry. If capitalists start fleeing the government can easily nationalize their assets. It also helps that all the core industry is state owned.

Yeah, there's a study showing that you can predict success based on the zip code https://www.huffpost.com/entry/too-often-student-success_b_10132886

These sort of scumbags leaving the country is a net positive.

It's not, but it doesn't discriminate against socialist states which is a huge step forward.

Yeah it's a bit of a mixed bag for sure, but I think even flawed analysis is sometimes useful to discuss to point out where people go wrong.

I really think we're entering an inflection point where there is sufficient critical mass that makes it possible for countries to band together and resist the empire. And the war in Ukraine has been the catalyst for this. The west ended up being sucked into a conflict on a scale it simply wasn't prepared for. A huge chunk of the existing western military assets ended up being committed to Ukraine which necessarily weakened western grip on the west of the world. Meanwhile, the economic war on Russia resulted in the creation of a whole new economy that's operating outside western control. BRICS is now a bigger economic bloc than the entire G7, and this trend will only accelerate now.

Right, when you look at their actions it's hare to think they're not a western tool.

It's kind of funny how selectively Smith is quoted in the west. They basically cherry picked his writings and completely misrepresent the poor bastard.

lol right, imagine having actual accountability in the government

👏

I don't think there's a chance of actual socialism in the near term, but it is worth noting that USSR is regarded as a time when Russia was a superpower. Lots of people who lived during Soviet times are still alive and overwhelmingly speak positively of it. So, there isn't a comparable level of anti-communist propaganda that there is in the west. And, now that Russia is being pushed into China's orbit we'll necessarily see influence from Chinese system in Russia. A lot of people are looking at China and realizing that this could've been them if different decisions were made in the 90s.

On top of that, Russian economy is already organized in a similar fashion to Chinese economy. State owned enterprise accounts for around half the economy, and government tends to exercise direction over private enterprise as well. I'd argue this creates more favorable conditions for transition to socialism than what we see in the west.

So, I definitely think there is a very real possibility of Russia transitioning to becoming a socialist state that's modelled on China in the long run.

it's basically this https://longreads.com/2017/04/12/the-elements-of-bureaucratic-style/