I think sharecropping may be a more appropriate analogy for modern social media.
In the 2000s, hosting was expensive, so capitalists were well-placed to create corporate social networks like #Twitter and #Facebook. They became the virtual “landowners”.
People, being social animals, joined these corporate social networks. The content they produced allowed advertisers to more effectively target them. Their content became the “crops”, which “landowners” successfully monetized.
From this perspective, it is cloud-based hosting (i.e. cheap land) an important driver of the #fediverse, making this #TwitterMigration into a virtual #LandReform movement.
Maybe #Zapata would say “las redes son de quienes las usan“ (the social networks belongs to those who use them).
I'd go one step better: Many parts of the world now have access to such high quality connections and economical home computing resources that we no longer require the efficiencies of scale that drove centralization in past decades.
It's not just cloud computing but even home computing.
We used to need centralized computing because there was just no other practical way of operating, but not anymore.
The sharecropping analogy sounds good, but I like to emphasize the evolution brought about by the technologically advanced option for such extreme decentralization.
Hmm. Well, to push the analogy, technological advancements in agriculture increased the productivity of a set amount of land, meaning that more could be grown for more people with less land required.
The analogy isn't perfect, but there's something there! :)
Does that make IRC and Laconica the counterparts? They could do more with less, but it made no difference since corporate social networks had so much hosting capacity to begin with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinampa
Of course. We have all collectively created more “land” where none existed. This is where the analogy breaks down, unless we look at settler colonialism and how European powers were able to use stolen Indigenous land as a pressure valves for their own rebellious peasantry.