this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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I was struggling to wrap my head around how federated social media works until I realized that email has basically been doing the same thing for 30 years. Different email servers are like instances of a federated network. You can send emails to people from within a single server or you can send emails to people on any other mail server. Your email address is a username followed by an '@' and the server address, just like on Lemmy. Email is a decentralized service I've been using the whole time!

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[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No, we don't disagree, though you might be reading in a stronger point than I made. I don't recall saying it's all capital's fault, whatever "it" is. However, I could probably be baited into doing so.

A tremendous amount of capital has been poured into Internet ventures. It out-competes mere human altruism. I think that if we want to have meaningful human experiences in our lives, we need to intentionally create spaces capital is not interested in occupying, or is prevented from occupying.

I think the janky details are important. Not the actual details, just the fact that they are janky. It forces one to understand and engage with the medium, which gives one power over the medium instead of the other way around. I think humans getting old, sharing what they know, and passing on is a vital feature of the human social experience, not a bug we need to patch around. (Ed Hew's registrar.ca will always be my spiritual domain registry.) There are lots of good business reasons why we would like commodified services provided by fungible service units rather than a society of human relationships, but I suspect there are some important psychological reasons for doing it the messy way, though no benefits to capital.

I think human spaces will always be fleeting and messy, as humanity constantly loses control of the most lucrative and populated spaces to our own greedy wealth. Human spaces are hard to use because they are always shifting, displaced and forced out to the frontiers, where things are less comfortable. In a real way we are all becoming marginalized citizens of an increasingly less human globe-spanning empire.