[EGreg]

Everyone is doing it, because it’s capitalism! Our public forums are privately managed and controlled by a few people. Venture CAPITALISTS invest in startups, get shares, prop up money-losing economics for years and then sell the shares to the public in an IPO. The corporations have quarterly earnings calls where they have to explain how they are extracting rents from their ecosystem, in order to make “number go up”, ie make shareholders happy.

Open source can liberate us from this, but we need someone to build really good and competitive alternatives to Twitter, Zoom et al.

I started Qbix to do it. LA Weekly just published this piece about my company and what it’s doing differently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37353229

[FactKnower69]

Capitalism isn't "things I don't like", capitalism is when investors are paid simply for "owning" things rather than being forced to sell their labor in exchange for a wage like everyone else. Your company is selling shares to external investors and is not worker-owned; it is a capitalist firm that pays dividends to people who didn't necessarily do any work for the company. Words have meaning.

[EGreg]

Words do indeed have meaning. Absolutely! And I am using the words advisedly, and in their original meaning. Venture capitalists are … well, capitalists! I don’t mischaracterize anything.

Capitalism is characterized by PRIVATE ownership of the “means of production”. That’s the term used in the 19th century, but today we could point to the technological infrastructure which enables each new user to engage with a network.

“Ownership” means exercising exclusive control over this, and excluding others from using (even a copy of) it.

Musk controls Twitter. Zuck controls Facebook. Durov controls Telegram. Moxie controls Signal. And so on. This is centralized control by people who won’t give you their back-end software. They’ll at best let you have your own custom client for a while, until they don’t (Reddit).

But in the meantime they’ll spy on you everywhere so they can mine your data and try to extract profits for shareholders. It’s called surveillance capitalism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

Cory Doctorow recently wrote about the “enshittification” that happens as the end result of all this private ownership. “I built it — I own it!” Well, if you believe that, you shouldn’t complain when a privately owned company does something, not even when they deplatform you. What you should complain about is the lack of open source alternatives.

Does Linus own Linux?

Does TimBL own the Web?

Does Rasmus Lerdorf own PHP?

Does Vitalik own Ethereum?

Just because one specific company in an ecosystem is privately owned does not mean the network infrastructure is centrally controlled by a few people.

In fact our company has experimebted with ways to reward contributors properly:

https://qbix.com/blog/2016/11/17/properly-valuing-contributi...

Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, Linux etc. can be hosted anywhere. It is a free market. By contrast, Twitter and Facebook (oh sorry, X and Meta) are digital feudalism!

https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

We also are working on utility tokens that, unlike shares, entitle people only to services in that free market, and not to expect rents to be extracted forever. If Qbix or Automattic extracts too much rents from their open source ecosystem, or doesn’t do the best hosting in, say, Hawaii, then a competitor can arise and compete with them, locally or globally.

In fact, Qbix can be used to host social networks in areas with bad internet, including rural villages, cruise ships and planes. They can help young people of all sexes be educated in rural areas with bad internet. Can the same be said of Google or Facebook? NO! Their capitalist ideas always involve sending the signals back to their own server farms. Whether it’s Project Loon (google) or the solar-powered drones (facebook), what they don’t offer is local villages to simply load their own forked copy of their backend software, and owe them nothing!

We do. We give the source code away and help hosting companies install it. We are working on creating an entire decentralized ecosystem where we don’t have centralized control … so if host locally, you NEVER have to worry about us training our AI models on your data, or any of the other thousands of things to ebtray your trust. It’s YOUR choice who will run your infrastructure — and it could be your friend on a local computer and connecting your town over a mesh network:

https://qbix.com/ecosystem