I haven’t played the board game but I have heard it is a brilliant complex multiplayer strategy game that really captures the shifting factional politics that the books and movies are so focused on.

I am super happy there is a digital version of Dune Imperium, really good digital versions of really good board games are super underrated. Especially when the core strategy of the board game is so good it makes super complex pc strategy empire games with terrible UIs, confusing resources and a million little fiddly useless decisions look pretty absurd in how much useless stuff they add just for stuffs sake.

I think the digital version will allow many more games of Dune Imperium to practically happen remote than otherwise would happen.

If by asking for a neutral place you are asking for somewhere that conservatives with hateful, childish, and dangerous beliefs that have no quantifiable basis in reality can go where they won’t be treated like children… shrugs

Not anywhere I will spend my time, conservatives can stay in their lame isolated pockets on the fediverse, the rest of the fediverse is for people who actually have functioning capacities for empathy and want to have adult conversations that adhere to reality.

Please refrain from low effort derisive responses like this when people are having an adult conversation you don’t like, it is childish and makes you look like a fool.

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

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 ?

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.

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?

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…

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?

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.

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.

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.

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???).

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.

What does this game do to differentiate itself from the likes of Dwarf Fortress, Songs Of Syx, Oddrealm or Rim World?

Oh honey, let me tell you, he is NOT lacking any training data.

I am making the claim that no matter how much technical debt there is in a code, it is not remotely comparable to occultism and demons.

I mean I am all ears, convince me computers don’t have as much arbitrary bullshit and strict specific details to processes, beliefs and rituals that don’t correspond to any intuitive rationality?

The last sentence is particularly confusing because it’s implying that most if not all company protocols are just as arbitrary and supernatural as attempting to summon a demon.

That is exactly what I am saying?

Or is this a case of sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic?

No this is a case of technology sufficiently broken and enshittified to the point that you can’t ever trust it to work right, simply or even logically if it was made by a large tech company.

A lot of annoyances that people regularly deal with on computers are either intended mechanisms to stop human bad actors or unintentional bugs passing off as features. You can’t really say the same about demons.

…I am honestly kind of terrified if you think the current state of computers and software is fine, I really hope you dont work in software design for the sake of the rest of us.

Every broadly intelligent computer programmer I have talked to agrees, corporations dont build software like elegant well planned skyscrapers they build them as multistory slums each piece added on in a rush until the whole thing collapses.