Hi! I’m looking to collate/list community-funded Fediverse ISPs with multiple services. Some aggregate of servers that offer multiple services, not necessarily just Fediverse related, but at least one Fediverse service.
As examples, I can list:
I know there’s one out there that also provides email (can’t recall which), which is interesting as most people wouldn’t dare.
Yes and no. I don’t want to compete with the community. I was just expecting the community to have bigger ambitions that having a barbeque with their friends, and consider organizing itself to bring down Kraft Foods.
As long as you live in a capitalist state, the most success you can hope for is to become the next Kraft Foods with all the same issues (and very likely the same stock owners soon after).
The only winning move is to not play their game.
Two things:
Something something “Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for everything else that has been tried”.
Most if not all revolutions in human history only occurred when the “power-adjacent” class sided with the ruled populace and actively fought the rulers. For us (the comfortable middle class) to shrug and “Not play the Game” is quite lame.
No, the best economic system is still communism, such as it was practiced in the Commune de Paris. Of course a quote from the openly racist and imperialist Winston Churchill can only be used to excuse capitalism.
The one who couldn’t even afford the upkeep of its armed forces?
Who exactly is surprised that an independent collective in the middle of a capital city surrounded by armies of every country allying themselves because independence is worse than their decades-old feud cannot sustain an army and is thus crushed, violently executed and has their history erased by building a cutesy church on top of it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacré-Cœur,_Paris
“They couldn’t feed their army” is an interesting critique for an egalitarian project
We are talking about economic systems. If the system is not able to keep even the most basic of roles of organized society (defense), it has failed.
defense is not the most basic role of society, what kind of distorted view is that. Defense for everyone is already a specific point of view at odds with the whole concept of what the Commune is about. There’s little need to talk about an economic system if the economic science itself doesn’t account for what is the goal here (namely, self-organization doesn’t revolve around a market)
Not the basic role, but it is one of the most basic ones.
You are projecting. You wish that people could live in peace and harmony and that followed the “concept” of the Commune. I am just pointing out that - as noble and good their ideals were - the Commune catastrophically failed when it was put into practice and had to face the reality of the world.
It shows a lot of hubris to talk about “goals” for society at large. It can work for a small group of people with a shared view and unchallenged leadership (like a small corporation or a family clan), but try living like that in anything larger than a small village and you will quickly see that the system is not sustainable. The Commune of Paris is only one of many examples.
I think something like a (socialist) cooperative is a particularly good fit for internet services.
They’d be be (co-)owned and managed by the users themselves. Plus internet servers are kinda cheap, I can easily afford to pay for one even all by myself. I just need people to talk to. And we need to collaborate on the content, moderation and software that powers it.
Absolutely. It’s hard to build stuff like that because we are so not used to it, but that’s where we need to go.
Well, the whole internet started as a cooperative of research institutes. It’s baked into the design, infrastructure, all early protocols are laid out like that. And even well after that, we got lots of independent discussion boards, blogs, different communities here and there. Main point being, people put in a lot of effort to make up their own nice corners.
I think issue isn’t that we weren’t used to it. That was kind of what everything was about starting with the 70s, and central to it for at least the next 30 years. It’s more that we actively forgot! Or better, were made to forget.
No, it wasn’t cooperative, it was libertarian from the start. Every man for themselves, do what you want, cooperate how you want, exploit how you want. The internet has never been a cooperative endeavor and the web hasn’t changed it. Some of the stuff was, but it was an exception: wikipedia, osm, etc…
“Cooperative” here isn’t just “be nice to each other”, it’s “work for each other” and the ethos of the internet is definitely not that.
I strongly disagree. If you look at protocols like SMTP or Usenet, or how packets are being forwarded or names assigned, that all heavily relies on cooperation. I mean that’s the single reason why we added all the stuff on top over the years. Because the original idea was, it’s a network of cooperating entities. And they didn’t really factor in exploitation and ulterior motives. And all the selfishness of the companies. We would have had far less issues if this wasn’t how it was laid out.
And all the structure emerged from groups of people using and shaping it. It used to be a lot more difficult. You’d be your group and want to interconnect to another group of people. The main point about a network is the interconnections. And back then you couldn’t just plug a cable into the wall yourself and be done with it. That was people paying some excavators and a location in the next exchange. Making peering agreements with other entites and it wasn’t as much about profit as it is today. Or they set up phone lines and the associated infrastructure. They stored and forwarded messages for other people, routed their data, set up exchanges and public boards. All working both for other people and for their own benefit.
Also, there wasn’t any superior entity who told them what to do. They themselves decided what protocols to agree upon, how to do it etc. We got very interesting stories on what they did with problematic central parts like DNS after the internet got too big and it couldn’t be one university doing all the work for the entire country anymore, as it used to be in my country in the early days.
I think they said not play their game. Not: not play the[any] game.
Oh the community does have bigger ambitions than having a barbeque with their friends.
But there’s a pyramids of need there to tackle beforehand. If we can’t even get the barbeque with friends, we can’t support the entire jump to Discount Krusty either.