I do the same! It works quite well.

My point is that any meaningful capital is directly tied to resource usage. Our ability to produce energy directly depends on our ability to mine resources to build power plants and maintain them. Saying that we can increase energy production infinitely is reductive beyond any meaning, it’s like a physics problem about a perfectly spherical cow.

Not at all! To use real examples to avoid spherical cows:

Used to be that you needed wood to generate energy. Then coal (which is an order of magnitude better). Then oil (another order of magnitude). Then solar. Then fission. Then (hopefully) fusion. Then who knows what. At each step, we’ve taken something which previously wasn’t considered a resource at all and used it to generate exponentially more and more energy. There’s no limit to how often we can do this-- things which were previously not resources become resources once we know how to use them.

Another example is food production. I saw a graph recently-- if I find it I’ll edit this message to include it, but it showed how it used to be that we needed 100% of our population dedicated to food production. Now it’s less than 1%. Meaning that 1 person is producing enough food for 100 people. Incredible.

These examples (and many more) show that our ability to produce things are not subject to limitations of natural resources, because natural resources aren’t limited. There’s enough energy coming out of the sun to be infinite, for all intents and purposes.

Yes, natural resources are limited, but that doesn’t mean that capital is limited. What I mean is that: yes, we’re using more energy as a civilization, but thanks to the investment of capital, we’re also expanding our ability to produce more energy at the same time. And “how much energy our civilization is capable of producing” can increase infinitely.

Yeah, the problem of pollution is certainly an existential threat. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that the type of threat is “we’re running out of resources”. We’re not running out of anything, we’re just producing too much atmospheric carbon!

This is essentially the argument that Thomas Malthus (economist) made in the 1800’s. And he had a point!

In his time, history had shown that the entire output of a country/state was people’s productivity times some function of land and labour. Meaning you could increase the output of a country by making people more productive (limited), or increasing the land available (limited), or by increasing the labour available (also limited). Therefore, there was a hard limit on how much output a country could have. And therefore we were fucked because population increases exponentially but output only increases linearly and has limits.

I think this is similar to your lego analogy: the pieces (land, labour) are limited, therefore the output is also limited.

Then the capitalist revolution happened and once the capitalist-style legal framework was in place which allowed the ownership of capital, countries’ outputs broke from the historical trend. We realized that a different function better described the output of a country. Rather than land, the correct thing to look at was capital. So the new function was people’s productivity times some function of land and capital (hence, capitalism).

And unlike land, capital is, in fact, unlimited. Someone might build a factory on the land, and owning the factory, he/she has incentive to improve the factory. “How much you can improve the factory” is, for all intents and purposes, unlimited. Therefore the output is also unlimited. This equation better described the growth in output that people were seeing in reality (GDP is an attempt to measure this), which has been growing exponentially ever since.

So… we’re not fucked? Well, it remains to be seen! We’ve certainly avoided being fucked so far! The standard of living of the average person on Earth has increased by a lot since Malthus.

Of course, this has come with negative externalities (pollution). We’re still seeing infinite growth riiiiiight up until we go extinct. The trick is to keep the infinite growth without going extinct!

EDIT: spelling correction

Good point. I guess my vision differs somewhat from that quote there. Dang.

Welp, good find! I still think my idea for federation would be more resilient, but either way, we’re all wishing the best for this instance, and I really appreciate these discussions we’re having. Cheers to that!

You’re positing we not try to convince people who hold wrong worldviews?

Absolutely fair enough. Am happy to agree to disagree. I enjoyed the debate haha!

And yes, you have a good point: Meta would indeed get value through federation, and perhaps you don’t want to support Meta’s goals, so you don’t want to allow them to proceed. Perhaps we could enhance our user/community level moderation tools to achieve these goals? Maybe you as a user could say something like “never shall any of my posts be sent to Meta’s instance”. Or maybe community mods could say “Meta users can’t join/post/see our community”. I’m even happy if instances enable such filters by default! I just don’t think defederation is the right tool for the job, because it defeats the vision of a connected universe.

I don’t feel like the example with email is fair, because it’s comparing a private messaging service between two users, and a social network where you provide content for other users

Yeah, but I believe the principle holds.

Again, thanks for the opposing viewpoint. Glad we had the debate. Cheers!

I’ve read that XMPP article before, but it doesn’t convince me.

Yes, Meta may “kill” the fediverse. That’s a risk. But either we take that risk, or we “kill” the fediverse ourselves by defederating. That’s my opinion.

EDIT: Besides, defederating just hands them more users. Wouldn’t you rather keep the users, and allow them to see Meta content? Maybe even attract some Meta users here by inviting them? The launch of a Meta competitor is what’s causing the risk to the fediverse. Federating with them is how we can mitigate that risk.

Risks/rewards for whom?

For programming.dev? If all we care about is the survival of this website, then yeah maybe Meta poses a risk and we should defederate.

But (with respect to the admins), no one cares about programming.dev. We care about the vision of a “fediverse”, where all instances’ users can talk to one another if they choose. If that’s what we care about, there’s no choice here: federate, or you’ve already broken the vision.

Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta’s content on their home page. Let’s beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:

• Let users block all @meta.com and all @meta.com communities if they choose.
• Let community mods block posts/cross-posts from @meta.com communities or users.
• Let community mods decide never to let @meta.com users subscribe or see posts on their communities.
• Let the instance owners decide never to feature a @meta.com user’s post or a @meta.com community post on “all” or “local”. Make it so that the only way to find a Meta post/user is by actively searching for it or subscribing to their communities. That’s all well and good.

But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: “Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won’t allow it. Go create an account there instead.”. As soon as you do that, it’s not a fediverse anymore.

… for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive …

If we can’t convince people of our point of view, then that’s our failing. Also, users on an individual level have the ability to block communities from their own feed, and mods have the ability to ban people and moderate views on their community. By de-federating, we’re saying “we hereby prevent anyone on our server from interacting with users on Meta, even if they want to”. That doesn’t seem appropriate.

corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation’s historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it’s future actions.

If we want to be a fediverse, then we IMO by definition allow users to post/join/view any communities they choose no matter where it’s hosted. If we don’t do that, we’re not really a fediverse.

I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:

That would be great! Every company should join the fediverse. That way, they’d all have a strong interest to keep federating with others, because no one wants to cut themselves off from valuable content. In fact, the only thing that does worry me about Meta joining the fediverse is that they might become “too big”. The more companies join, the less likely that is to happen.****

I appreciate your engaging with me on this, though you haven’t convinced me yet :)

I’m in agreement with you that Meta absolutely intends to exploit “the fediverse” for their own benefit: to gain users by making their platform valuable.

But… my take on this is: so what? If the fediverse can only operate when all actors are benevolent and selfless, then it won’t last very long at all. And, even if it does, it’s not as valuable to me that way, so I’ll be leaving. What’s the value of a fediverse if it doesn’t even federate with any of the major players that have the most resources?

This would be even worse if we defederate later, once it turns out that Meta is trying to do something that really warants a defederation.

I honestly don’t think that anything ever justifies defederation, aside from technical limitations. If you want to run a gated forum, fine, but then don’t call it a “fediverse”. It’s just a forum. Would we say that it’s fair for Google to say “From now on, Gmail will not send emails to @republican_party.org email addresses because we don’t agree with them”?

EDIT 1: I haven’t made my point very clearly. Am currently editing this message to make it clearer.

EDIT 2: Left the comment the way it was. Am struggling to express myself properly-- this is the best I can do at the moment.

Yeah I mean I agree that the phenomenon described by that “paradox” exists, but I’ve come across it before and I have very little respect for that idea.

My opinion is that this “paradox” has a simple resolution:

1. Intolerant ideas (including messages and posts) should be allowed, considered, and countered with better ideas. Should be easy, since intolerant ideas are generally shitty ones.
2. Intolerant actions (and I’m differentiating against speech from action here) should be prevented.

I say that pretty much covers it. “Intolerant people” isn’t a useful thing to talk about. Either they’re holding intolerant ideas in their head and we should respectfully convince them to reconsider, or they’re doing intolerant actions (again, not including speech/posts/comments) which should be prevented.

The “paradox” just seems like an excuse to justify people’s own intolerance, so I don’t like it.

I appreciate your reconsidering your position! Thanks for taking my argument in good faith hahaha. I was worried I’d get some hate for it.

Cheers!

I’m also interested in the same. But honestly even if Facebook is operating in bad faith, such is life. We shouldn’t abandon our core concept even so. In my eyes, we’re testing the “hardness” of the fediverse to operate even if individual instances, howsoever large, operate with self interest.

So, are we saying we want more people to create accounts on Meta’s Threads?

That’s what defederation would imply: people who want to interact with Meta’s folks and be in touch with Meta’s community would end up creating accounts there. We’d be handing users to Meta by doing that.

Clearly, Meta has tons of resources to invest. If they have half a braincell among them, they’ll be able to create some value with those resources. Given that they’re launching Threads with or without federation, we now have two options:

1. We let Meta enhance the value of all instances.
2. We lock out Meta, and all their value created remains their own.

What are we even talking about here? A ton of people put in a ton of effort and work to create a platform where the whole point is to have different organizations be able to inter-operate without any one instance gaining too much power. As soon as someone with actual resources wants to contribute, we shut them out? Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the “decentralize so that no one can gain too much power” model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.

If we become an echo chamber where the only one who can be part of the “fediverse” are people without resources, then what’s even the point? Who wants an email service that can’t send emails to Gmail and Hotmail, but only YourFriendlyLocalInstance.com?

The way I see it, we should absolutely not defederate. I’d prefer to see Google or Twitter also join the fediverse, and have them competing amongst each other to make sure we have enough competition to keep any of them from wanting to defederate.

EDIT: Quoting this deep child-level comment, which explains my point of view better:

We care about the vision of a “fediverse”, where all instances’ users can talk to one another if they choose. If that’s what we care about, there’s no choice here: federate, or you’ve already broken the vision.

Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta’s content on their home page. Let’s beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:

• Let users block all Meta communities and all Meta users if they choose.
• Let users set that none of their posts should federate to Meta.
• Let community mods block all posts from Meta users.
• Let community mods decide never to let Meta users see any of the posts on their community.
• Let the instance owners decide never to feature a Meta user’s post or a Meta community post on “all” or “local”. Make it so that the only way to find a Meta post/user is by actively searching for it or subscribing to their communities.

That’s all well and good.

But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: “Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won’t allow it. Go create an account there instead.” As soon as you do that, it’s not a fediverse anymore.

Ah I see. Well fair enough! Thanks for making it

I lament I only have 1 upvote to give! Hold on let me spin up a bot…. (just kidding).

But seriously this is great! I wonder if it can be expanded to auto-populate communities rather than being a hardcoded list.