This scenario would also be aligned with the goals of this initiative. I don’t think they see a problem with it. The majority of the signatories are techno-optimist liberals who believe the good tech bros should be in control of society’s discourse to prevent the American empire from collapsing. Billionaries are evil because they are enemy of the status quo.

Well, if they build enough leverage, they could force Bluesky to adopt a version of AT that is less skewed in their favor. Protocol details are easy to change when you have only one adopter, lol. Not sure this is part of their strategy though.

Also you seem to be thinking that anybody involved in this (the fediverse, bluesky, this initiative) follow a logic of commoning, where this money will be spent to improve the technical protocol itself. I don’t think this is the goal at all here. They want to change the power structure in the world of social media and integrating with AT is just a tool for that, that might change going forward. AT is interesting only insofar it supports their goal, but the interest of the “AT commons” (which for what I know is basically non-existant) is a secondary concern for now.

Most people are not free from the need to work and might have plenty of personal factors pushing them into compliance. Working for a company that gives good conditions and good salary should never be shamed. First because it alienates the people in question, reinforcing their disregard for any ethical or political discussion. Then because it sow division among the workers. The choice of the word “guilty” makes it worse.

Working for an evil company is not intrinsically an evil act: you might be trying to unionize it, you might sabotage it from within, for your own interest (taking naps) or political reasons, you might be salting it.

If you really want to run a purity test on people, you should try at least to assess the space of action they have to fight against the company evil practices, their knowledge of it, the risks they are taking if they went for action. If a person has a chance to act against the evil impact of the company, risks pretty much nothing, has all the knowledge and psychological strength to act, and then doesn’t act, then we can start talking about unethical behavior.

Would it though? I really don’t care about AT, but from their perspective, any € spent on AT will matter incredibly more than on AP. AP is a mature ecosystem, with a lot of complex interests, endless dialects and a lot of mess to grapple with. AT is basically not a protocol yet and can be shaped a lot more.

They are exactly the people that have always been advocating for this stuff all along. They are doing their thing. Nothing to be surprised of

You cannot fork or edit the code, it’s just “source-available”.

I think for your use case, Anytype is good enough, but it’s not FOSS. Obsidian is also not FOSS. I’m not a purist, quite the contrary (in fact I use Notion), but maybe you want to check what’s behind.

Also, to help you make sense of your confusion and take a better decision, you’re comparing a bit apples and oranges.

Some of the tools, like Obsidian, are purely knowledge-management software with some productivity features sticked on top (like kanban visualizations).

Coda, Appflowy and Notion are primarily tools to build software, which can be knowledge-management software, productivity software or other stuff. They operate on a higher level of abstraction and flexibility, but out-of-the-box, for a single user, they are also probably worse than stuff like Obsidian.

Technology cannot be disentangled from society and the economics that create and develop it. Technology is social process, it is not a technical matter.

The idea that technology is a thing on its own, maybe even with its own agency, is an ideological stance pushed first and foremost by the people you don’t want to hear about exactly for the purpose of obscuring their role in the whole deal.

You should start the union

Pitting different types of workers against each other automatically promotes you to a scab. Purism and sectarianism are much more harmful to labor organizing than union busting.

I’m a union organizer in tech. My downvote was the 8th, not the 1st. I was busy doing a call with striking riders in Greece. Keep up the good work, scab.

Quit this bullshit. A lot of tech workers working remotely are contractors, precarious workers. Content moderators, data labelers, and the likes are not paid 6 figures and they are not privileged. Most of the workforce of these companies are not white, rich dudebros. Stuff like this adds insult to injury.

Well, nutritional science doesn’t have a great track record. While a lot of bullshit is justified using the word “holistic”, it is also true that nutrition and in general our metabolism are affected by so many factors that a reductionist approach to nutrition more often than not fails to give actionable insights, especially if you move away from very broad statements. It doesn’t help that every few years, some core concept of nutritional science is discovered to be the result of lobbying.

you’re right. Saucers (despite the English name) are meant to drink beverages, therefore they are small glasses, not small plates

None of this put a dent in CO2 emissions, because more energy available just means more energy consumed. These are distractions, especially EVs. For the sake of how livable the planet will be in 50 years, all these efforts had a negligible effect.

The current trend of governments abandoning mitigation strategies in favor of adaptation is a testament to the irrelevance in the overall response to climate collapse. The “green transition” is just a way to sell more and produce more.

You’re implying advocacy can beat financial and industrial interests on critical topics, something that goes against what we have been witnessing for a while.

I said we can, I never said we do. More possibilities doesn’t mean better possibilities.

For that, I’m already collaborating on activisthandbook.org and I curate my own lists of content. What I see social bookmarking is good for is circulation of less structured knowledge, short-lived information (i.e. about events or courses), news like publication of relevant books and so on. Wikis take a lot of effort to curate and are the last step of a process of information discovery and processing from certain environments that starts somewhere else. Lemmy or other social media can work at an intermediate level between personal knowledge and structured, consolidated knowledge shared in the commons.

well, we have pills to change gender, pills to talk to God, we can immediately reach out to most humans in the world without moving, and we have a lot of fascists to kill

What are your goals, how will you achieve them, and how will you maintain cohesion?

My goal is to build more effective political organizations. I abandoned my career to do this as a consultant, I do this as a volunteer for the orgs that cannot afford me, and I do it in the orgs in which I’m politically active first-hand. Building communities of experts and people interested in improving, on a global scale, is part of the process.

To me, it seems you have an idea and a lot of resistance to joining anything that has existing problems.

There are effective orgs with problems and there are orgs with no chance of having a positive impact because they spend all their resources reproducing themselves. No problem joining the first kind, but I don’t believe there’s a point beating a dead horse with the second.

One of the biggest obstacles facing this idea in the long term is how organizing is usually very specific to local problems, so most information that would be shared is only relevant to a single campaign at a specific point in time.

I’m not American, so campaign organization is not really the frame I’m immersed in. I do a lot of organizing with Americans, so I understand the context, but if you want to build a political org that can last a century and it’s able to evolve and fit changing needs, that kind of know-how is generic and reusable. There are intrinsic dynamics of how humans behave within organizations and how organizations grow, and anything pertaining to those aspects is knowledge that is transferable and can live a long time. If you build for the short-term, you are subject to the ebbs and flows of the current moment and your impact will be short-lived. I’m not against this way of doing things, but I just don’t find it interesting or ambitious enough.

Conversation about democratization jumps from the 1920s IWW to 2000s Ver Di

A suspicious amount of my peers are past-IWW members who are now part of VerDi, lol.