This analogy keeps being made but I am not convinced it is correct.

Any participant in a dynamic network can choose with whom to have relationships. That's the point of a firewall or cloudflare or a million other security efforts.... to prevent interactions which due to malice or accident would cause some harm to come to the local system. There is no obligation to participate and in fact with the fediverse it is specifically designed with defederation in mind.

The comparison has been made to email explaining the fediverse concept to new users. Most people know about email. But Usenet is much more apt, if you are familiar with that. Usenet had (has) similar concepts such as the way servers share, mirror and distribute content from others servers. There is a burden imposed on any given server according to the others it has communication with. If you never had the pleasure of being on Usenet, it was basically like email discussion lists where the inbox was public. But you still needed to have access to a server to read and post. Messages were sent in similar way to email but every server would retain a copy of messages prior to forwarding them on to a list of other servers. They would in this was percolate through the network. Every server had its own version of the history of usenet according to the choices of the admins and there was not central authority or main copy.

Usenet server admins exercised broad discretion deciding who they would have a relationship with and what they would accept. Nobody was every perfectly connected to everybody else for various reasons including: legality, morals, politics, technical, geography, taste and happenstance. Individual people, hosts that allowed too many bad users, problem communities, filetypes, topics of conversation.... all kinds of things were blocked by admins. Some news servers were permissive and some were restrictive. Servers that were excessively permissive became hubs of spam, and thereby risked losing their relationships with other servers because other admins got too annoyed having to deal with it. And servers that were excessively restrictive had a hard time keeping users because you couldn't really participate properly if unable to see a lot of groups and not seeing a lot of the traffic, plus your messages would not propagate for others to see. So it was a balancing act.

For the most part this is an analogy that isn't helpful for a lot of people.. But maybe on SDF there are some who can recall those days. I do not think the concept of blocking servers breaks the concept of the fediverse at all.

(I am still undecided on my opinion on the question but I think it is a legitimate possibility.)

A post reddit signup. Just a casual weekend sort of nerd. Not an engineer, developer, sysadmin, sysop or anything of the sort. But I do appreciate yousall.

I am sad about reddit.

a depressed guitar-playing sysadmin who identifies with marvin the martian... I was like "wait is this my dad?" Well he he retired now.

FWIW he has managed to get old (2x your age) and even though I had a somewhat strange childhood I wouldn't choose a different parent even if I could. A lot of people I know who had "normal" parents suffered a lot at their hands in ways that were not even conceivable to me. He didn't get any kind of therapy til more recently and it has vastly improved things for him and those around him.

I'm one of few in the world who know him and he is one of my favorite people.

There is some great stuff here. Like DIY repairs not voiding warranty as long as you follow i fixit, and that it is designed to be DIY repairable. This should be legally mandated for anyone manufacturing a smartphone. One issue stuck out to me though:

"3 years of warranty^⁵^ and monthly security updates, plus 2 years of Android upgrades.^⁶^"

Footnote #6:

From the global launch date of Nokia G22

Looking at this page, it seems to be targeted at a general audience who is interested in keeping the same device for a longer time. Can't assume there will be custom ROMs or whatever.

Only 2 years of updates from launch sounds terrible. What good is the hardware if stuff doesn't run properly? Once you stop getting android updates, the whole thing starts loosing functionality because you can't install/upgrade apps. Even the security upgrades are only for 3 years. It sounds like Nokia does not really intend for these things to be around that long. I wonder for how long the parts will actually be available.

Small step in the right direction and it's good some engineers and supply chain people and designers and tech writers are thinking this way and figuring what a smartphone that isn't intended to be garbage would look like. But lots more infrastructure is needed.

brain interpreted the post title as "Elite fediversers have brain oxygen levels lower than seals"

Thought it was some joke/meme about people who use lemmy too much

I have had issues with a couple lemmy instances today. I think there is both a software upgrade and a massive influx of users going on.

it would be kind of like that except that

• spez et al wouldn't be able to choose to keep a controlling number of shares. all the shares would be offloaded. he could have 1 share just like any other user.

• laws that govern publicly traded businesses would not apply. it would be a coop or other model. details would depend on jurisdiction(s) but many do have separate legal structures for such entities. In the US, REI and in Canada, MEC are buyer coops which are fairly well known. There are also housing coops and other structures for inspo.

• shares could only be owned by people who had a specific kind of interest in the project, such as being individual users, mods etc. furthermore, individuals would be limited in number of shares (e.g. 1 share each)

This is not a fully formed proposal. :) but in terms of thinking about how the world could be I think a worthwhile train of thought.

a person who was interested in this kind of thing could do a websearch for "the cooperative movement" for historical context. not to be overly rosy about it, the movement basically failed to accomplish its goals at the end of the day. however, it did make a lot of good interventions while it was existing. for example the famed (if crumbling) canadian health are system is a result of cooperative farmers' movement. furthermore, coops which continue to exist under capitalism experience a lot of tensions and can become corrupted.

also lookup: Mondragon in spain

boycotts have always been very difficult to pull off and fail virtually every time.

For pros and cons a good place to start is Rules for Radicals, published in 1971 by the great community organizer Saul Alinsky. He has many stories to illustrate but in summary writes regarding boycotts:

Once the battle is joined and a tactic is employed, it is important that the conflict not be carried on over too long a time. ...There are many reasons of human experience arguing for this point. I cannot repeat too often that a conflict that drags on too long becomes a drag. The same universality applies for a tactic or for any other specific action.

Among the reasons is the simple fact that human beings can sustain an interest in a particular subject only over a limited period of time. The concentration, the emotional fervor, even the physical energy, a particular experience that is exciting, challenging, and inviting, can last just so long — this is true of the gamut of human behavior, from sex to conflict. After a period of time it becomes monotonous, repetitive, an emotional treadmill, and worse than anything else a bore. From the moment the tactician engages in conflict, his enemy is time.

BTW Alinsky (b.1909) wrote this book to try to stop baby boomers from being dumb and fouling everything up. I am not a huge fan of the intergenerational model of class conflict but I think it is interesting.

this would have been a good thing to do for some of the people who deleted their accounts. the ones who had accounts which could have credibly been given subs.

even though that sub is like the most annoying and sanctimonious place on reddit, I am sad for these people that they are losing their forum. where else will people express their anxiety over wasting lemon seeds by throwing them away? or congratulate each other on the ecological benefits of purchasing complicated, unfix-able gadgets to perform simple and infrequently performed tasks?

For anyone who like me has never heard of "temu", it is said to be some sort of chinese "fast fashion" website which might/probably traffic in the products of slave labor. Presumably in a way which exceeds other "fast fashion" but my investigation was quite shallow.

the solution is to collectivize reddit but I do not have a good plan about how to do that.