Future will tell. Id like to find out that you are right and fediverse will prevail without monetisation. Yet its growth seem really sluggish so far.

The world needs decent communication ecosystem, we need less manipulated societies at least for democracies to work. Fedi has a potential to be a world changing project, not just another irc-type cave of geeks.

You are right that enshitiffication does not quite fit here, as by Doctorow, it also involves reaching market dominance, which is a prerequisite to squeezing more velue and simultaneously offering less. Getting paid for your work is a far cry from market dominance :) It is just fair.

Thanks for detailing. I also witnessed what happened, but I tend to blame corporate surveillance capitalism instead demonizing the very concept of ads.

Firstly, ads are information of value exchange, which itself has value. Even anarchists need to exchange goods and services.

Also, enthusiasm-based services die, because volunteers get tired, retire or find new exciting projects. They need money or other value to keep working in the long term. And we want them to.

Now, can there be a different system of ads, which would not enshittify it all? I think there can be, maybe it isnt yet created.

From the user perspective, I can imagine an option in server settings, letting me switch on some ads to support its upkeep. It would let me tick some boxes, e.g. only handmade fishing gear and personal IT assistance (whoever the sponsors are). It could be served passively like rss, with no tracking - but the server owners could be paid by estimates, like tv does. Or maybe even some ethical cryptography is possible in the open source system.

Maybe not exactly like that, but you get my line of thinking. Because there is also another type of enshitification: open source projects get abandoned, broken and die just like commercial ones.

Yes, there are donations, but most of us can afford to make only so much of them.

Therefore I prefer to think about reinventing and reclaiming system of honourable advertising, instead of extracting unpaid labor from all those volunteers until they quit.

Why? Could you please add some arguments to your harsh judgement?

I can imagine a model of ethical, user opt-in ad service, which could be privacy aware and still allow monetizing. Users could actively subscribe topics of goods-services they are interested in, as to sponsored account, or in even more anonymised, rss-like way (techies surely know more appropriate methods).

I would subscribe to some ethical and relevant for me ads, especially if it helped sustain and develop a platform.

Isn’t there one already widely adopted? The rainbow mesh pentagon? Why rebranding?

I do not know enough about Electron, but I definitely notice slow startup on Oneplus Nord (2020). I even use different configs for desktop and mobile to disable some plugins on the phone and make it start faster. Still I think twice whether I want to look up sth in Obsidian in dynamic situations, like in a conversation - it just takes too long. However, once its up, is really snappy.

This is what happened to me. Not with business I own though, but with one partner NGO, and one of academia. I just use it via browser then, if needed.

Not without Android, but partly degoogled. Using e/os - it seems to support much more devices than Calyx.

Some features of google do not work: google lens, google drive business on account (personal works well). Happy not to know if Teams work.

My main banking app used to work, but stopped last year. However, I found that banking on mobile browser is not that bad, just logging in takes longer. Revolut app works flawlessly though, so your bank may work too.

If you judge countries by GDP, you should adore not only systems of USA, but also Quatar and Emyrates. Numbers only tell a fraction of story. Of course, when industrialisation came to USSR, GDP growth in the ashes of war was impressive in percentages. Like if you go from 1 to 3 dollars a month, you grow astonishing 300%. And all just by copying foreign solutions: there was almost nothing originally created in USSR. Even now russia is primarily primitive dig-out-and-sell economy. Russians often say that we in the Baltics owe them all these factories. As if we wouldnt build industry ourselves after a prosperous interwar period. As if Finland now was poor and regretting that it fought back this “marvelous” empire. And of course you are right: employment in almost forced labour environment was high :) Even if GDP numbers were ok, life was shit: you couldnt buy things even having money, and people wer not allowed out, instead of not allowed in, like real prosperous countries do. So no, GDP is not a good benchmark here.

As for the sentiment for USSR - of course it is strong inside brainwashed russia, where all media is state controlled. Currently their main national narrative is about the war, about being a superpower. USSR was a large, war-winning empire (even if with allies, even if repressive and evil). Sadly they are still killing Ukrainians to become empire again - all enabled by those sentiments and loss of narratives about human dignity. War, power and greatness is what matters to them. On top of that, russians who still remember USSR are on the edge of poverty in their current cleptocratic liberalism, but they were young and somewhat secure then. But try looking at this data not from imperial centre of russia, but any Baltic state - you will see a different picture.

In reality soviet union was a system of evil disguised as ideology. This is why they spoke about systems and made leninism mandatory in schools. The problem is that violence and ideology do not cancel out, they can be, and in reality were functioning as one.

Soviets only pretended to fight for a better world, but in reality it was just a deceptive cover for occupations, mass extortions and violence. Everyone was poor, repressed, and almost nothing was created.

It left a heritage of prevailant fear of marxism in ex-soviet countries, because it was experienced first hand as violence covered by bulshitting.

It is extremely hard for left-wing politics in countries, where the memory of communist repressions is still alive in almost every family. Hard to even speak against capitalism here, because capitalism meant basic human rights: to have home, to work and travel freely. Now capitalism means something else, but the word still remains somewhat untouchable.

So I would say, good systems are something to strive for, but humanity first.

What do you mean by “direct answer”? AI generated summary?

You could say it is a supply and demand question in a very limited sense. Limited by space. There is no shortage of buildable areas in general, for example, around the cities, but there is shortage of housing in central and attractive places. Releasing building regulations would simply ruin existing quality and turn everything into terrible dense and faceless outskirts we all know. Then the demand would shift elsewhere, to remaining fewer good places, making demand even harsher.

Home ownership is essential for identity of places, so the solution is exactly the opposite: regulate building and secure rights to own your home.

very interesting: so if you need a particular order of the loop, you controll it via filenames… Curious to try this out. Thanks!