What if the business world worked this way? What if we turn it completely upside down, and run things from the bottom up instead of top down? Is there anything that the current business world does that can't be done just as well or better through a federated, cooperative approach?

I certainly am seeing this. My whole life is dedicated to cooperatives, and I'm seeing a lot of co-op formations around the world. In India, they just established a government ministry of cooperatives.

the internet evolution has been a really interesting. We all were hooked by the dopamine peddler silos that like the frog, we didn't feel the water warming.

Federated is what the internet *is* at it's core.

To coopt a phrase "Nature is healing" as people are reawakened to the concept of federated. And if they need an example of how it works....it's just email for social media

In the olden times, the internet itself was largely a community-run endeavor. Many websites would go offline when the owner turned off their computer and went to bed. ISPs rented closet space in commercial offices to store servers. Everyone ran a BB. It was much fun.

I'd love to see that, but we're going to need to see actual community-run, community-supported, community-governed instances first. Right now it's a bunch of individuals running a server on their own dime for funsies. I feel like the next big step is experimenting with actual functional self-governance, and not a thousand benevolent dictatorships.

creo que tienes razón, el fediverso es la descentralizacion del pensamiento, y los cambios sociales siempre inician cuando un grupo de personas, mientras más grande mejor, se ponen a pensar juntos en cómo arreglar el mundo. De alguna manera, el fediverso es como los cafés parisinos de la Ilustración, veremos a donde nos lleva eso

@Cassandra I sure hope so! I suspect that with a cooperative-based economy, UBI wouldn't be nearly as necessary, because money wouldn't be continually scooped out of the hands of every day people and dumped into a few wealthy shareholders' bank accounts. Instead, it would be recycled back into the very same community it came from, since the community owns the business. But there will always be a risk of someone falling on hard times, even then, so UBI would still be important.

I really hope people get it, because as of now Mastodon is actually reaching Twitter scale but for example in Italy the vast majority of folks just use Instagram for anything. And it’s really frustrating

@Cassandra meeeee too!

I hope this will be a beginning for more good things...🙏
A great movement....
I hope that...🙏

Yes, #Fediverse is different as it's a product of civil society rather than business interests. I doubt it's popularity will really move the needle any more then the widespread adoption of #FOSS has.

The basic structure of democratic states is partly #P2P (one person, one vote), but even that notion is now under threat by authoritarians. The phase change that needs to happen is a political and ethical one, but most people eschew thinking on this level.

@lori Can you give me a summary/intro/segue? It starts in pretty densely, and I'm not sure I've got the right frame of reference to make full sense of what's being discussed in this article or how it relates to what I was saying.

What you are describing is very similar to the evolution of #freesoftware . Unsurprisingly, it scared some organizations and it was then neutralized into open source.

Humanity has survived to this point because of cooperation, and evolution favoring cooperation. Paradoxically, we have evolved to the point where the uncooperative also survive.

when it comes to racism and bigotry, the fediverse is no different, though. It is incredibly white here. Minority voices are barely heard.

Interesting perspective and questions... I think people will group together into tribes in the same way they do everywhere. This is what humans do. It comes from an evolutionary history where we vanquished the majority of Neandethals, Denisovans, etc. Those remaining were absorbed into us. The thing I appreciate the most about the Fediverse is the lack of ads. Capitalism and its corporatists use ads to subvert humans into wasteful consumers. I personally would have no problem taxing the crap out of advertising and/or outlawing mist altogether. If a "consumer" requires something in particular, they already know where to go.

it's just status updates man, don't get all philosophical about it

@another_katt @kralcttam I feel like back then, the internet was much more bottom-up than top-down. Now it's like everything comes from a corporation, or is managed and controlled by one to suit their purposes. And since corporations by design exist to extract $$ out of our pockets, they are intrinsically at odds with our best interests, so everything has this underlying tension to it introduced by monetization. That wasn't there in the beginning. It was just people doing their thing, being social and hanging out. Like it is here.

@another_katt @kralcttam I don't think it was better, honestly. There were other things that were very wrong with the world, that have gotten better, alongside the things that have gotten worse. For example, we have much better visibility into the harms and dangers our behaviors have on each other, thanks to social media, and this lets us be more supportive and kinder to each other. I don't think the #ActuallyAutistic community could have existed back then, much less have actively worked shoulder to shoulder alongside other marginalized groups to fight for human rights as we do now.

I have the same perspective as you on nostalgia, I think. We should strive for the best outcome going forward, because that's what we have (limited) control over. But the past should inform those efforts. History is the experience we learn from.

The fediverse is very much like early 1990s B.B.S. (bulletin board service) reimagined for 2023.

the third place

spread? Do people viscerally understand the principles at play? How about with regard to money?