Notices by Alexandre Hannud Abdo (aleabdo@hubzilla.com.br)
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Alexandre Hannud Abdo (aleabdo@hubzilla.com.br)'s status on Thursday, 06-Apr-2023 01:23:20 JST Alexandre Hannud Abdo @Alek @yaso Still, I think we should be careful with where we aim at. Adding democratic governance models everywhere don't simply make systems more democratic. Democratic governance is an expensive endeavor and its cost-benefit can often be net-negative for democracy. In the Fediverse, a lot of effort goes into making sure that specific instances and their software are a choice, not a territory. This lowered dependency between users, user-admins, and user-developers guards against spontaneous monopoly, so it doesn't feel like a good target for normative democratic governance. The territory-like entity is the ActivityPub protocol, and that is not governed like Eugen's branch of the Mastodon code. If we say Mastodon is the territory to be fought for, we're shifting democratic effort and legitimacy to an entity of choice, and thus promoting system concentration. Which I fear will actually reduce democratic outcomes, as it would go against pluralism in the Fediverse. I think we'd do more good ensuring ActivityPub, and other protocols like Nomad, improve in democracy-oriented governance, democratic energy and people, so they can demand of implementations, and instances, stronger guarantees of user freedom (for which I chose to cite Nomad, which is more advanced on those issues than ActivityPub). And as such, the first thing anyone can do to meaningfully improve democracy in the Fediverse is to not use a major provider — and if you choose wisely you may even get quote-posts as a prize for your good deeds ;D