Notices by Chris Gioran 💔 (chrisg@fosstodon.org), page 2

We are not three bunnies in a trenchcoat.

I. I am not three bunnies in a trenchcoat. I want to make that clear.

@aral This hits incredibly close to home for me.

That's exactly why i quit my job. I want to build _something_ that gives people the opportunity to be creative without being beholden to an exploitative system rotten to the core.

I think it's possible. Perhaps i want to believe it's possible. But if its not, then it's still worth doing.

I am so fucking pumped to be in these conversations. ✊

@aral Huh, that's an excellent point.

I had never thought about it, but if I, in the position of privilege that i am, notice something as being systemically bad, then imagine how many other, less privileged people have been impacted by it, for who knows how long.

And, not the most important bit, but kind of telling that we claim the discovery of it for our own by making up words for it. We really should check first if the most affected by it already have a term for it.

@mike805

Absolutely. I am not under any illusion that people will jump on a standalone piece of software just because of the morals it supports.

But a free, decentralized, anti capitalist software movement requires a lot of effort and moving pieces. And if we don't put in the work, then it will definitely not happen.

So i want to try, even if the odds are massively against me. At least i am having fun while doing it 🙂

@aral @laura

[...] a massively decentralized Internet, consisting of a huge number of small communities, requires database management systems that are built from the ground up for the purpose.

The systems available today are built to support massive, centralized, owned datasets, at immense complexity and cost, with intentions that go against the principles of a free and open Internet.

#asmalldbms

@mike805
The problem i am identifying is not technical, but political. It's about what are the intentions behind the infrastructure we develop, and my position is that we need to encourage a new wave of free software built specifically against centralization.

So yeah, we have the tech today to build small sites. SQLite is an excellent example of that. What we need is a widespread, explicit movement against big tech.

Shout out to @aral and @laura who (AFAIK) spoke about this idea first.

@aral I want to believe. I really do. I can see that people increasingly see guillotines as the correct answer.

The only thing that keeps me from being optimistic is that too many people take the fascist route and side with the rich folks, wittingly or not. Look at Greece and the last election there.

@aral

This is exactly the risk faced by instances that are big enough to draw the attention of surveillance capitalists.

They are a weakness in the system, because they are such a ripe target for acquisition and abuse. That's always what happens when a player accumulates power. And that's not a technical issue - it's a policy problem.

For example, if there was an agreed policy that no instance should be bigger than 1000 members (or it gets defederated) that's wouldn't be an issue.

For 2-3 weeks now, newspaper front pages have been featuring AI fluff pieces almost daily.

However, this one from the WaPo is probably the saddest so far.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/04/ai-bubble-tech-industry-outlook/

Paraphrasing - the economy is saved by the AI bubble. That's saying the quiet part out loud.

This whole construct cannot crash and burn soon enough.

@aral You know, it's going to take a lot of work to reclaim FOSS as the anarchic ideal it needs to be. Right now it's connected to an antiquated idea of playing nicely with big corps that stopped being useful a long time ago.

We need new licenses and new business models that form their own ecosystem and can viably compete with corporate entities.

@wakame @aral @avirr If something useful is produced by VC funded ventures is coincidental and just useful PR, not the goal. The goal is perpetuating capital.

And i cannot stress the magnitude of the theft that is people not owning what they work on. It is sickening and one of the reasons i quit my job. I can't believe i've done all this work on a pretty big system, over a number of years, and i own _no part_ of it. None, zero.

@aral @avirr It is a common reaction to say that progress wouldn't have occurred if these applications weren't funded by <insert capitalist venture>.

I call bullshit on that.

It implies that only capitalism fuels innovation, which is a blatantly uninformed position and useful only as post hoc justification of externalities.

"Sure, we may have caused all this harm, but look at this one problem that got solved by the tech we developed"

Yeah, how about we solved _that_ specific problem instead?

@Natanox @aral When i worked at Neo4j, a DBMS vendor, "scalability" was always an issue. Almost always poorly defined and very very few cases actually needed large amounts of data (>10TB).

Definitely not all of these, but a fair amount, were click streams or other user tracking cases. And they cost insane amounts of compute and storage to run, and armies of people just wasting their time creating basically nothing.

I hate this.

@aral The amount of human effort and power consumption that goes into generating and mining "clickstreams" is astonishing.

This accumulation of "digital exhaust" is a huge waste of human creativity and material resources that does *nothing* except serve capitalists. It's a huge industry that were it excised from society _everyone_ would benefit.

And i classify as bullshit job every single one in this racket.

@dysfun I don't know if open source will lead the charge, but I'm here for it.

@aral I share your concerns. It is easy to imagine a rapid decline in Europe, sparked by what is happening overseas. Sweden and Denmark, for example, already have fascists in their governments, so the conditions there are ripe.

I see a lot of questions here around software #licensing. It is an important issue but i don't know of many reputable sources of information about it. All i know i learned by talking with FOSS lawyers and license checking tool creators.

If you know of good resources, including experts on #Mastodon, send them my way and i'll promote them.