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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Specifically in the case of Lemmy, open source software (also federated in the case of online services) are intentionally very difficult, if not legally impossible to restrict (due to the GPL or AGPL licenses not allowing for proprietary distribution).
The only ways capitalists can control something like Lemmy is to so something on the ISP end of things (usually DNS blocking, but sometimes more technically competant blocking), or like what France is trying to do, through the browser (which someome could bypass with a different browser), which would be a very dangerous slippery slope.
Open source is about as socialist as you can get when it comes to software.
If I were a capitalist looking to control the discussion, I would throw money at the developers or their successors until I had a puppet controlling the direction of the protocol. Then, I could slowly introduce features into the protocol to favor my business interests. Eventually, I'd make it closed source and enshittify as normal.
Considering that the devs are literally outspoken Marxists, I think it would be prohibitively expensive or impossible to buy their loyalty like I described. Furthermore, our community is (so far) pretty tech-savvy and privacy-conscious, so any such changes would actually be noticed and revolted against. It's absolutely plausible that their successors could go rogue somewhere down the line. But Lemmy and its devs give me great hope for the future, which I haven't felt in a long time. It's just kinda in my nature to not blindly trust people when analyzing systems, even and especially when things are going well.
My point is that capitalists can control anything given enough money and motivation. It should never be assumed that they can't take power, because the moment we let our guard down is the moment they'll swoop in and take everything.
For sure. IMO it's one of my most important examples of people doing productive things for reasons other than profit. I know it's a bit more complicated than that (for example Canonical and other corporations funding Ubuntu), but the existence of the FOSS community really is a great sign that socialists are right about people.
The protocol is ActivityPub, which was standardized by the W3C. Lemmy (nor KBin, Mastodon, PeerTube, etc.) have control over that standard. They can suggest things, but if Lemmy were to break compatibility with ActivityPub, you bet your ass people will fork the project, or just switch to KBin.
See: OpenOffice being aquired by Oracle and then being forked to LibreOffice for an example
But yeah, we can never let our collective guard down.