We need solutions that look like Lemmy in the public space to _decentralize_ power so we don’t run into this type of problem. I don’t think there’s a magical structure that fixes everything, and I don’t even necessarily think that capitalism has to be the dominant economic system in play, I just think we need to come up with ideas on how to reduce the power of those at the top.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that this is exactly what we are at Lemmy to do. Where capitalism produced Reddit, communitarianism produced Lemmy. The best effort of both systems is now live and the two are competing head to head. We win when Lemmy is the superior option for enough people that we actually start bleeding Reddit out.
This argument is very different from the argument I’m talking about. Lemmy isn’t a government, nor does it attempt to fill that role (as much as my instance’s “Agora” community wants to think it does), so whether Lemmy is successful doesn’t give any insight into whether a more decentralized form of government could be successful.
communitarianism produced Lemmy
That’s a pretty generous description.
A more accurate description, IMO, is that two people wanted a safe space for their extremist community (tankies), and they had a working version at the time that a lot of people were frustrated with Reddit. Those two are still running the project, and they moderate their instances very tightly. But many people outside that community came and decided to make something good out of it, which is why additional instances popped up run by people with different motivations from the original pair.
So I don’t think communitarianism produced Lemmy, at least not initially, but it did help turn Lemmy into what it is today.
We win when Lemmy is the superior option for enough people that we actually start bleeding Reddit out.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think we have already won in that people choose to stay here over returning to Reddit or whatever social media platform they came from. That said, active users on Lemmy seems to be steadily dropping, which is a bummer, but I’m still able to have decent discussions here, so it’s working for me.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that this is exactly what we are at Lemmy to do. Where capitalism produced Reddit, communitarianism produced Lemmy. The best effort of both systems is now live and the two are competing head to head. We win when Lemmy is the superior option for enough people that we actually start bleeding Reddit out.
This argument is very different from the argument I’m talking about. Lemmy isn’t a government, nor does it attempt to fill that role (as much as my instance’s “Agora” community wants to think it does), so whether Lemmy is successful doesn’t give any insight into whether a more decentralized form of government could be successful.
That’s a pretty generous description.
A more accurate description, IMO, is that two people wanted a safe space for their extremist community (tankies), and they had a working version at the time that a lot of people were frustrated with Reddit. Those two are still running the project, and they moderate their instances very tightly. But many people outside that community came and decided to make something good out of it, which is why additional instances popped up run by people with different motivations from the original pair.
So I don’t think communitarianism produced Lemmy, at least not initially, but it did help turn Lemmy into what it is today.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think we have already won in that people choose to stay here over returning to Reddit or whatever social media platform they came from. That said, active users on Lemmy seems to be steadily dropping, which is a bummer, but I’m still able to have decent discussions here, so it’s working for me.