Unpopular opinion: It's actually kinda nice, I don't mind it.

• Mulberry silk sheets, pillowcases, duvet covers ($1.2k/set) - best sleep I've ever had, keeps me crisp and cool at night

• Eames chair ($10k) - the best lounge chair I've ever had

• LG OLED TV as a PC monitor - the best PC monitor you can get

Well-regulated capitalism on the other hand has resulted in an explosion of technological advancement like no other era in human history.

The key is regulation. Not too little, but not too much either. Some things, like minimum wage, are clearly under regulated. Other things, like mandating USB-C, are honestly better left to the free market (and I fucking love USB-C.)

so instance mods will be incentivized to comply with Facebook’s demands to attract new users and maintain their current one

This is where your argument falls apart. Why? There is no incentive for instance mods to want to grow their instances exponentially.

If Facebook's ActivityPub grows to be incompatible with the existing implementation, who cares? So what if you run a Mastodon instance and aren't getting millions of new users a day?

This is much ado about nothing. While there is a shared platform, enjoy the ride, and if they don't want to play by your rules anymore, there's no harm to anyone in saying goodbye and staying your course.

It is absurd to think XMPP would have gained traction without Google. And it is an objectively shitty protocol, so Google dropping it was the right move. It is kind of weird to see people holding up Google dropping XMPP as some horrifying example of embrace, extend, extinguish, when anyone that's actually developed software with the protocol wants it to die in a burning fire.

I feel like there's no winning if you're a dev at one of these companies. Go with a centralized protocol, you get shit for creating a walled garden. Take part in federation, and people give you shit for that too. I think it's genuinely amazing that we are seeing engineers that have made some of the most fundamental software that the internet runs on dip their toes into federation.

100% agreed with this. The scaremongering just makes no sense.

Science doesn't exist in a vacuum. With capitalism, you're directly incentivized to invest in R&D because you can come out with a better product that people will want, thus advancing science. Everything from the lightbulb to HVAC machines started as capitalistic endeavors as opposed to purely academic ones.

There is still a power incentive. In the proposed system we would likely factions rapidly forming to gather the most power and resources as quickly as possible. It would probably be quite bloody. (What you are describing is effectively the tribe system, which rarely ended well for most tribes.)

As long as resource scarcity exists I just don't see this working out, unfortunately.

I agree it works at village-scale, but in my opinion what we have seen is a failure of communism to scale to a nation with tens or hundreds of millions of people, and survive for decades at that.

Government regulation is the route to go for the edge cases where capitalism incentivizes dark patterns. For cases where an endeavor is unprofitable, government investment is typically the way to go, and seems to work rather well (eg NASA and the many inventions that came out of it, that arguably form the basis of our modern life.)

I am not calling for unfettered capitalism, but I do think we have struck a somewhat happy medium today compared to almost any other point in human history. I think it can be improved further, but I see no evidence, historical or otherwise, that communism could fare better.

There is incentive for competition from Google, Twitter, etc, that would cause federation as a whole to grow without resulting in a single authority taking over the network.

Yes, it's amazing.

Generally more positive than Twitter and easier to use than most Mastodon clients.

There are no users “exploring open source alternatives.” Have you seen the Lemmy signup flow? It’s a complete shitshow that probably turns away 95% of people to begin with.

Facebook almost certainly doesn’t see Lemmy and Mastodon as a threat or competitor. They adopted ActivityPub because it’s nice, and they’ll move on as they need to scale, and Lemmy and Mastodon will continue to survive as they always have.

The issue is that greed is an aspect of human nature. You'll never be able to eliminate it. Any system that relies on greed, corruption, and selfishness not existing, will ultimately fail, because that system relies on humans pretending that certain emotions don't exist.

Capitalism is deeply flawed, but it's stability as a system is not predicated on humans trying (and inevitably failing) to delete fundamental human emotions.

As far as (1) goes, 90% of the content on Lemmy is just a Lemmy circlejerk, the remaining 10% is memes. What influx of "low effort content" could possibly make the discussions on Lemmy worse than they already are?

As far as (2) goes, you realize your data on Lemmy is open to everyone to scrape, not just Meta? Every single one of your upvotes is public.

It is disingenuous to say that communism has never been tried. It's been tried over 30 times, but it's never been able to live up to the ideal of "true" communism.

If your system falls apart as soon as people become greedy or power hungry, it's not a practical or stable system. You can't expect people to ignore those emotions and you definitely cannot bake that expectation into a system that needs to be resilient enough to sustain a society for centuries.