I think the most important thing at this point is to build a meeting point outside of reddit for all those people.
It doesn't have to be a fully built reddit alternative, but it should discuss how software is governed.
I think that's what it all lies to.
Software is not like other products. Websites are not like other products.
We've let them own us for almost 20 years now.
But we used them for more than that, in china they had post-walls in the street. We used to simply have community boards in real life.
And now those highroads are being jeopardized by companies in their own interest.
Shouldn't we ask ourselves, is it a benefit to humanity, if ours highway communication is being controlled by corporate entities ?
Can't we make an ONG which sole goal is to discuss and exchange on how those highways should be governed ?
This is a chance for humanity to grow but we are turning this into a pile of disaster instead of grouping up.
I do not think any individual at this point should be "in charge" of those high ways.
It should be an opportunity for all of us to join up, and build a governance framework of sort ; and from there create free tools which are not tied to economic narrow sight. Developers of such tools are all around the wrold, and centralization or decentralization is not the problem, it's either an achievement or a nice-to-have thing ; but in most cases, users don't care.
How do we group up, how do we discuss together like we do on HN, but we keep posting "some new alternative" every few week without realizing that if we group up in a simple github organization, we might be the most impactful workforce of the entire web ?
It doesn't have to be a fully built reddit alternative, but it should discuss how software is governed.
I think that's what it all lies to.
Software is not like other products. Websites are not like other products.
We've let them own us for almost 20 years now.
But we used them for more than that, in china they had post-walls in the street. We used to simply have community boards in real life.
And now those highroads are being jeopardized by companies in their own interest.
Shouldn't we ask ourselves, is it a benefit to humanity, if ours highway communication is being controlled by corporate entities ?
Can't we make an ONG which sole goal is to discuss and exchange on how those highways should be governed ?
This is a chance for humanity to grow but we are turning this into a pile of disaster instead of grouping up.
I do not think any individual at this point should be "in charge" of those high ways.
It should be an opportunity for all of us to join up, and build a governance framework of sort ; and from there create free tools which are not tied to economic narrow sight. Developers of such tools are all around the wrold, and centralization or decentralization is not the problem, it's either an achievement or a nice-to-have thing ; but in most cases, users don't care.
How do we group up, how do we discuss together like we do on HN, but we keep posting "some new alternative" every few week without realizing that if we group up in a simple github organization, we might be the most impactful workforce of the entire web ?
Do we really have to benefit from this ?
Is this all not above us ?