>change the world from the ground up on and individual level I’m a long time member of several polling-analysis Discord servers and personally know the chatters there, e.g. https://discord.gg/K5gJtHkUX4 if you want to check it out.

I’ve interacted with the members for months. Sometimes they complain about censorship on Twitter or talk about Parler. Whenever they do I talk about the dangers of turning over so much private information to Parler and mention the alternative of the Fediverse. Since I know content discovery on the the Fediverse is hard, I don’t just say “the Fediverse” I pick out specific instances and timelines to link to them, like https://qoto.org/@freemo.

I am doing exactly what you said: >change the world from the ground up on and individual level There’s just one problem: They don’t respond to it. It’s not that I’ve been lazy or failed to tailor my message, it’s that my message lacks social proof. Normies need social proof. It’s a Law of Psychology as inviolable as the Law of Entropy - yes a few statistical outliers may violate it, but as a statistical ensemble people never will.

>that doesn’t ask the people who are being affected what THEY want Certainly it would be wrong to unilaterally cut people off from Facebook through government decree or to yell at them about how stupid they are for not switching. But just because people see Facebook as their best option right now right this second doesn’t mean they want to be locked into it forever and whatever abuses it decides in the future. It means they would like to see a better option made available before switching.

And to the main point, by “better” they do not simply mean a better piece of code or even just a better technical user experience. By “better” they mean they want to see a stronger, unified resistance to Facebook’s monopoly; an alternative that is more organized and more professional and supplies them the social proof they need to feel comfortable leaving the Facebook plantation to a group strong enough to protect them from Facebook’s retaliation.

>facebook is a website As you said yourself: >caring what FAANG do Facebook is just synecdoche for FAANG, FAANG is just synecdoche for the entire Corporate Internet, the Corporate Internet is just synecdoche for the Centralized Control of Communication including not just the Internet, but also including broadcast media, print media, and even an iron grip on the education system from birth through adulthood, And that Centralized Control of Communication isn’t just an incidental private business making a good product but is a monopoly backed by the entire Lawfare-Military Complex.

I can walk away by myself, but The Complex will just come for me later. And I can convince my friends and family to walk away too, but then The Complex will come for all of them later and I’ve consigned those I care about most to death along with me. It’s a coordinated action problem and it’s not enough to just haphazardly communicate locally and pray for the best - race conditions will happen. We need a synchronization primitive to help us overwhelm The Complex together instead of getting picked off one by one.

And I mean voluntary coordination, of course. There’s no need to force every single person to act the same way, but we do have to amass a critical mass of volunteers before rushing into the breach.

@jeffcliff@shitposter.club @xj9