I’m inclined to agree, but my little nitpick is that corporations don’t always put necessities behind a paywall. For example, Rolex sells watches, which are hardly a necessity. Similarly, we do not need Reddit (or Lemmy, as nice as it is to have) to live. As miserable as life would be without music, you will not die if capitalists restrict your access to music.
So really, corporations put restrictions on not just things humans need, but on things humans want too. Specifically, fun things. If we include activities and land access as “things”, then it’s not a stretch to argue that capitalists restrict these things too.
Specifically in the case of Lemmy, open source software (also federated in the case of online services) are intentionally very difficult, if not legally impossible to restrict (due to the GPL or AGPL licenses not allowing for proprietary distribution).
The only ways capitalists can control something like Lemmy is to so something on the ISP end of things (usually DNS blocking, but sometimes more technically competant blocking), or like what France is trying to do, through the browser (which someome could bypass with a different browser), which would be a very dangerous slippery slope.
Open source is about as socialist as you can get when it comes to software.
The only ways capitalists can control something like Lemmy…
If I were a capitalist looking to control the discussion, I would throw money at the developers or their successors until I had a puppet controlling the direction of the protocol. Then, I could slowly introduce features into the protocol to favor my business interests. Eventually, I’d make it closed source and enshittify as normal.
Considering that the devs are literally outspoken Marxists, I think it would be prohibitively expensive or impossible to buy their loyalty like I described. Furthermore, our community is (so far) pretty tech-savvy and privacy-conscious, so any such changes would actually be noticed and revolted against. It’s absolutely plausible that their successors could go rogue somewhere down the line. But Lemmy and its devs give me great hope for the future, which I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s just kinda in my nature to not blindly trust people when analyzing systems, even and especially when things are going well.
My point is that capitalists can control anything given enough money and motivation. It should never be assumed that they can’t take power, because the moment we let our guard down is the moment they’ll swoop in and take everything.
Open source is about as socialist as you can get when it comes to software.
For sure. IMO it’s one of my most important examples of people doing productive things for reasons other than profit. I know it’s a bit more complicated than that (for example Canonical and other corporations funding Ubuntu), but the existence of the FOSS community really is a great sign that socialists are right about people.
The protocol is ActivityPub, which was standardized by the W3C. Lemmy (nor KBin, Mastodon, PeerTube, etc.) have control over that standard. They can suggest things, but if Lemmy were to break compatibility with ActivityPub, you bet your ass people will fork the project, or just switch to KBin.
See: OpenOffice being aquired by Oracle and then being forked to LibreOffice for an example
But yeah, we can never let our collective guard down.
There really needs to be more regulation. For instance how Facebook and Google just buy all the competition. Unfortunately introducing new regulations or enforcing current ones keeps getting harder due to corruption.
That is only a patch on a sinking ship. Capitalism will always lead to such “corruption” bc it strives for profits and when it hits a roadblock like regulations it will try to circumvent it. The system is just trash
So, Nestlé basically
Yup, since the news about making water private i just don’t buy any of their shit
Highly recommend to read The Black Book of Corporations by Klaus Werner and co. There is plenty of interesting examples _
I don’t understand this. Businesses are organizations of people that get together to produce something and sell it.
In this scenario is someone else producing the thing the business is restricting?
