In the end I don’t think internet users in rich powerful countries are the users most likely to benefit and invest their time into in the fediverse. They might be the ones with the most free time, money and privilege around computers which makes being on the leading edge of niche technologies far easier, but I don’t think using the fediverse vs commercial social media is thattt crucial of a difference for most (add a million qualifiers here except if you are black, queer, trans etc… I am talking in relative terms here) livimg inside the borders of colonial powers like the US, France, Germany etc…

Speaking as a hetero white dude who grew up with a decent amount of privilege the fediverse isn’t for the countless versions of me living within the borders of colonial powers…

It might have been programmers living within the borders of colonial powers that did most of the labor to create the fediverse, and most of the early users might have come from within colonial powers but I think it is important to recognize that the gift that the fediverse represents to the world is the capacity to empower people living outside the borders of colonial powers to own and run their own social networks instead of having some random Facebook employee who doesn’t have the time or basic knowledge of a country to make major decisions about what news accounts to moderate as dangerous spam and what to allow.

From a 30,000 foot view, speaking in broad terms and specific values and priorities, what do you think are the best strategies for flipping the script on the fediverse being mostly a tool used by people within the borders of colonial powers to one used by without and within?

I wonder about the capacities of fediverse software being useful as a compliment to HOT open street mapping type initiatives in the wake of disasters and just in general?

(Are server costs just generally cheaper/easier in colonial countries to run or is it purely a money and time thing? I don’t really know)

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 month ago

      small, less mature countries have shit for internet resources.

      Isn’t US internet memetically bad (in particular the rural one) compared to a “shit country” like Chile, one of the ones the US got paid to sabotage with military dictatorships?

    • stanleytweedle@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Yes but I admire OP’s optimism in challenging the Fediverse to somehow deploy probably the largest and most complex human endeavor ever conceived to quickly achieve economic parity between non and former-colonial powers. That’s like the Principality of Sealand saying they’re putting a man on the moon. I love it.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
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      1 month ago

      What do you mean in as precise of terms as you are capable of by the term “mature” in this context?

      I think the answer to that question is similar to the answer to my original question.

        • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
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          1 month ago

          In terms of internet infrastructure, I think the biggest opportunities here are local grassroots municipal/community government spearheaded build outs of high speed internet that completely bypass the concept of the western business and foreign aid structure that involves pulling in some for profit or “”“non-profit”“”" company with a complex set of incentives that mostly don’t align with the communities they are ostensibly there to help build infrastructure for.

          I suspect how effective or ineffective globally this method of funding internet infrastructure development is will have a major impact on the long term future of the fediverse as a whole… since it isn’t within the borders of colonial powers where the inherent freedoms to the internet will be defended. It will ultimately be the “periphery” states and states far beyond the borders of colonial powers that shore up safe heavens for internet communities. Seeing where the US is going, I can only hope that my country will not block my access to those communities down the road…

  • DMBFFF@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    The leaders of countries such as the PRC, Modi’s India, Putin’s Russia, ans Iran might not like the idea of decentralization.

    Indeed, they might not like the internet itself.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
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      1 month ago

      looks out my windows the corporate fascist hellscape of the US

      Ommm yeah I genuinely not saying this to detract from the seriousness of oppression within the countries you are speaking of but…. nobody with real power in the US likes the internet either?

      Did you see what Elon Musk did to Twitter? It wasn’t less a business acquisition than a public execution of an entity that subverted the ability of state sponsored propaganda to be effective all over the world (including specifically… Saudi Arabia and the countries it has business interests in). I mean I don’t know if Elon knows this or not, I really don’t care. The people that gave him the money to pay for the execution on the other hand I am more convinced knew exactly what the general impact of their “investment” was going to be.

      • DMBFFF@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        What I find quite annoying is how people created these monopolies.

        50 years ago, there were 3 (arguably 4) American car companies—still a de facto oligopoly, but 3 is better than 1. The Japanese and VW added to it.

        Today we essentially have one search portal, Google; one social network site, Facebook; one video-hosting site, YouTube; and one micro-blogging site, Twitter/X.

        If people spent perhaps 1/10th of their micro-blogging time on other sites, Twitter might not have been as attractive to Musk and his backers, but they chose ease over choice, and now they’re wailing over what he’s doing with it.

        I’m off-topic.

        I mostly agree with your statement. Maybe Amazon likes the internet, but probably most others in big business in the US don’t: it might account a bit for the shitty websites of many of them.

        • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
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          1 month ago

          There are obviously a million reasons for this, greed and corruption being obvious touchstones but I also think culturally we weren’t raised to think this state of affairs was grotesque.

          A lot just comes down to how people perceive the fediverse, is it just an alternative, another tool you can use that works just as well as corporate social media (lots of handwaving here) or is it a niche community for specific subsections of tech-ish nerds that becomes successfully codified as a tertiary, unimportant place by pop culture?

  • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Yeah… those leeches from underdeveloped countries should be hosting fediverse servers with all that expendable income they have.

    What a shit take.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
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      1 month ago

      Please point to where I insinuated this? If people living outside the borders of colonial powers want to host their own servers great, if they want to join US, French, Japanese etc… servers then… also awesome! How on earth are you taking from my read that the point of this line of questioning is to criticize underdeveloped countries or the people that live within their borders?

      the whole point of this post is to ask about what ways we can best practically help those people without perpetuating the same structural power imbalances that got us into the present day problems and suffering we face

      If you had interacted with my post in a genuine way you would have realized an essential part of my question is how best to help propagate the fediverse outside of its narrow niches, do you build fediverse servers in your own country and make them friendly to foreign users? Do you try to create resources and gather money to help people in those countries just host their own fediverse server?

      What are the practical real world advantages and pitfalls of both strategies with respect to the fediverse in particular?

      • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        I think I responded to the tone and then you see premise that insinuated that colonial oppressors are just using their advantage to once again oppress the poor indigenous people of wherever in yet another way. Which I don’t agree with.

        The concept of the fediverse seems to be that admins host instances and are pretty welcoming to new communities… So if someone from I dunno Togo would setup a lomé or togo-politics community it would be supported. Meaning anyone from anywhere can use the infra provided to setup and moderate their communities.

        If anything the system allows people more advantaged with resources (time, money, know how) to provide an open space that can be used by everyone (within reason). Without being beholden to big tech and her hidden profit driven agenda.

        I would be more concerned about accessibility and usability from the perspective of a lot of people. As many countries that are still developing have limited time and access. And I don’t know if the current state of the fediverse in it’s development is of much help.

        I’llIncreasing the usability of the whole ecosystem with improved clients, moderation tools etc (the stuff that fediverse users are requesting, and those devs are working on) will help.

        Once it is mature, more will come. And like with tech, financed by early adopters this seems similar.

        In the mean time I see people from all over the globe post stuff about many things, including national interest stuff that would otherwise have passed me by.

        And I don’t see stuff posted in languages I don’t comprehend because my profile filteres them out. I don’t know if there are any Swahili/Papiamento/Mandarin/Indonesian posts on lemmy, but Lemmy supports many languages so that might be a thing.

        Lastly the whole us vs them (colonial powers, oppressors etc etc) might be applicable to a lot of the world, however, garnering support for a cause by making accusations against the fediverse and the current generation of hosts and users does not help. I would advise a more constructive stance in general. If you see people actually being as you describe call them out and tell it like it is by all means, but this was not the way to get the ball rolling.

        I’d probably gone with something like: the fediverse is growing, how can we help it develop in a direction better serving people in developing countries. To get them out from under the power hold and monopolies of the big tech conglomerates. … or something.

        In that case I would have stuck with an answer like above… we need to foster and nurture it’s growth so it becomes a good alternative and the people will come. Plus… you know… ask people from these countries or maybe even get devs from there involved using stuff like patreon. Getting feedback from people not using your product… and finding out why they don’t is hard.

        But Lemmy for example already did a solid by making sure the platform supports a looooot or languages “out of the box”.

        Hope that’s better :).

        For the record, I did not downvotes your reply as it deserves an actual response.

        • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
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          1 month ago

          Lastly the whole us vs them (colonial powers, oppressors etc etc) might be applicable to a lot of the world, however, garnering support for a cause by making accusations against the fediverse and the current generation of hosts and users does not help. I would advise a more constructive stance in general. If you see people actually being as you describe call them out and tell it like it is by all means, but this was not the way to get the ball rolling.

          I am a random fool with an internet connection, I have no power to define anything, and on the contrary I think the only way to get us on the same page is to just came out and say it how it is.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
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      1 month ago

      True!

      My intention was to make it clear that my reference to these numbers was back of the envelope, I know there is a huge amount of complexity to this question.

      Do you begin solving physics problem by making sure you start from answering the most complicated version of a problem including simulations of every single little expression of friction and wind resistance etc…. No you say the cow can be abstracted as a sphere and start from there. The question isn’t whether to abstract the cow or not, it is over the quality and consequences of the abstraction.

      With that in mind, yes I do think it is worth asking the question of whether the best path forward is for fediverse servers within colonial borders to build open communities that users from without colonial borders can join and use or whether the better path forward is to instead directly help build local fediverse instances hosted outside of colonial borders. I don’t know, it is a massively difficult question to answer, I guess I should keep repeating that so people don’t keep assuming I am naively thinking this is a simple question and I have absolutist all or nothing views of things.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
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      1 month ago

      So, not sure what you mean by this

      Nothing, do you honestly think I am watching what is happening right now in the US (where I live) and NOT thinking it is utterly terrifying?

      Yeah the manufactured hysteria around TikTok doing the same shit western social media companies do is pathetic and absurd (and like, if republicans are up in arms about manipulation of kids, what about tobacco companies???).

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    What about the usage demographics within each country?

    In underdeveloped/exploited countries, internet usage is more likely to be concentrated among the economic elites who formerly benefited from colonialism—so if increasing adoption in those countries just follows the pattern of other internet use, it could have the opposite effect from the one intended.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
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      1 month ago

      Yeah that is what makes this shit so exhausting, at every step where you solve the immediate expression of a systematic problem you have to step back, evaluate your solution and shake your head at how clearly your biases tried to recreate the same problem in your solution.

      I agree that we should always be asking questions like you are because this could easily be a future timeline the fediverse goes down.

      How do you think we can reduce the chance of this happening?

      Also, the interface between the oppressors and the oppressed is always multidimensional and unbelievably manifold. The daughters of ultra powerful oppressors funnel money to the oppressed in shades of moral complexities that are difficult to pin down as righteous or not. This is the way history has always been, what matters is the results, and how much members of the ruling class are willing to betray their class for the greater good of humanity shrugs.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
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      1 month ago

      You can’t drop a mean comment like that and not expand on what you specifically mean by it.

      What makes my post brain dead then specifically ?

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    Yes Lemmy is a form of wealth. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see in a wealthy country

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
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      1 month ago

      Then how do we most effectively fight wealth inequality along the axis of software, fediverse software in particular?