Rimu recently started a new rant thread. I copied the response of the person they had targeted and in less than a minute Rimu had deleted the comment.
This is the comment Rimu did not want people being able to see:
https://feddit.uk/post/53824748/26875911
This is the thread I shared it on:
https://feddit.uk/post/53824747
Hot take: all this drama exposes the real problem with the utopian anarchist/communist/socialist philosophies of many Lemmy users - the philosophies assume that, unshackled from the oppression of a ruling class and the need to work for sustenance, people will naturally come together to work for the good of humanity. But outside the human instinct to help people we know in real life directly, the desire to be pro-social falls off rapidly as the necessary tasks increase in abstraction. People need some other form of motivation beyond altruism.
In a market economy, that motivation is profit.
It the fediverse, the motivation is getting to be the king of your own little castle where you can push your personal political philosophy on the world. Well-adjusted, happy, reasonable people don’t spend thousands of hours writing code for obscure social media sites in their free time. Those people go snowboarding. Or they hang out with their friends. Or they volunteer at a food bank. Or they raise a family, or start their own business, or hit the gym and fuck a bunch of hot people. Developing software is almost universally an exercise in frustration - broken dependencies, undocumented side effects, protecting against cybersecurity threats, unreproducible bugs, angry and ungrateful users, passive-aggressive stack overflow comments, etc. Only the truly unhinged would do such work for free - like if you desperately need a platform to shout that Mao did nothing wrong.
The real solution isn’t to build an anarchist utopian social media site. It is to stop expecting people to do work for free. If you want reasonable people to develop a good social media site, you need to pay them. If you want mods who moderate to foster positive, helpful discussions instead of for the sake of their own egos, you need to pay them. They could be snowboarding instead! Snowboarding is so much more fun than deleting bot accounts and getting death threats from racist incels.
This is a hot take, and I don’t know if I agree with all of it but… Am a dev, would rather be snowboarding.
I feel this extends quite a bit to the entire design of the Fediverse/Threadiverse. We’re this network of interconnected places. We have communities. But to quite some degree, we use that to build specific places for our individual tribes. Be it pro-AI people, anti-AI people, online “anarchists”, tankies. There’s a lot of identity going in. We rarely have a “tech news” community. It’d be the tech news community on the tankie server, or the anti-zionist tech news, you’d better pay attention if the people in the comments like or dislike AI, because this isn’t about facts… Mingling with the people here is often connected with some kind of world view I have to subscribe to.
I don’t necessarily share the perspective on software itself, or volunteer work, though. I’ve done some volunteer work in my real-life community… I’ve been using Free Software for decades… And I believe a lot of that is just done because a lot of people have a good heart. Or whatever motivation, but I’ve regularly seen it come with no strings attached.
I mean, I’m not saying that all humans are completely self-interested. I think volunteering in your local community is often a great way to meet some excellent people. And local volunteering contains a lot of the feedback loops that will encourage normal, well adjusted people to participate - you are becoming part of a real social group, a group of friends, who are doing something positive that they can see the results of in their own lives.
And I think the pioneers in early free software had a lot of these same things going for them - they were part of a small, dedicated community, leaving their mark on the world.
But a lot of foss software has been written by people either in non-profits, or in for-profit organizations who finagled their way into getting paid for the work. Eg, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Docker were / are mostly written and maintained by people who are being paid for their work.
I think Red Hat probably shows the best way forward. Write the software as opensource, then sell hosting and support as a service.
And as part of the software they provide, they should also provide an ootb way to ask people for money. Essentially, you could have a fediverse instance that has moderation and (likely at least in the beginning) content creation/aggregation/curation as part of the service. The selling point being that the feed and comments are of so much higher quality that it is worth it to chip in $1/month or whatever to participate.
I think the main problem is that far too few people are contributing to these projects and major decisions aren’t made collectively instead of by a single person. Isn’t Rimu effectively the sole dev for PieFed, in much the same way that Nutomic and dessalines have been the main people running the Lemmy project?
I think all of these people are reasonable per se, but there’s an old quote that I feel fits nicely here: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” If there’s no one to challenge your decisions, you’re inevitably going to make some bad ones eventually.
Compare that with any healthy FOSS project where major decisions are a group effort. Things move more slowly but a single extremist view is much less likely to pass. Projects like that also tend to attract more contributors in the long run, because people can trust that their contributions (the time they spend coding, not snowboarding) will be evaluated objectively by a group rather than suddenly being discarded because they don’t fit one person’s worldview.