Your reasoning touches on a deep philosophical concept: what is “ownership”?

I’d say owning something is easy enough when you can’t duplicate it (I can’t just copy your car or house to save money). Duplication, however, means the ownership is technically the abstraction of “intellectual property”, which worked fine when duplicating cost money and people paid money for it.

However, the very essence of using a computer on a network is simply using copies. You’re not reading this as I write it, but a copy your computer downloaded.

I don’t think so. FLOSS devs never seem to attract FLOSS designers. I’d love to collab with them, but they all seem to like designing not-FLOSS things.

Who said we’re in late stage capitalism? If you ask the libertarians, we’ve been out of any sincere capitalism since WWII.

So how do people go about defederating? Is it just a matter of making new servers, or does it require anything else?

I’m happy to stand up against The Man, but it seems like once the masses get involved they don’t feel personally responsible to preserve what they enjoy. They seem to give general consensus to [Big Tech Company], then [hard-working FLOSS developer] comes in later to fix it.

If I’m going to get “political” here, I almost think people need to be sold more on the importance of self-reliance. One prior historical precedent was around the 1750’s about taxation, and that’s had a nearly non-trivial impact on society. People intuitively grasp land ownership, so it should translate to data ownership as well.

I may be speaking in defense of something I don’t know, but I don’t see a direct problem with other apps (e.g., Threads, Twitter if they change up what they’re doing) to start talking with the fediverse.

The bigger problem is when they start throwing their weight around. The W3C (and groups like Mozilla) have had many strong battles with Google trying weird stuff because they’re the biggest guys in the room (e.g., FLoC).

As long as we can rally behind the loyalist FLOSS geeks, we’ll always be alright.

Technically, anything can be scraped (e.g. Internet Archive), but that doesn’t mean it’s interactive.

I’d say the volatility of computer data means someone could theoretically nuke it whenever they want, though there may be remnants on other instances.

I’m curious enough to enforce Cunningham’s Law: It’s not on blockchain, so it’s deleted if the instance is deleted.

Right wing? Money is a pretty nonpartisan matter.

Most of the right-wingers have already fled off to Gab, MeWe, or Mastodon.

That really depends on which philosophy you subscribe to.

The TL;DR is that existential and post-modern philosophy say it’s varying degrees of relative, while everything anyone said before ~1800 was saying that facts were immutable.

One fact I can glean is that the data itself may be real (e.g., the wavelengths of light that hit your eyeballs) but the perception is a composite illusion of our mind (e.g., the fact that you just saw a kitty).

You’re forgetting the future stages:

• holy crap! im autistic
• hey everyone, im autistic
• okay, i guess it just explains everything
• nobody seems to care that much
• alright, i’ll go find a good-paying tech/accounting/science job now
• proud to be ASD, if anyone cares