... that might enable sustainable development, let alone the question of taxation for donations towards public interest work: all that is unnecessarily complex, because at their core, all those regulations are also hacks.

They're hacks of a regulatory framework that at its core - falsely - assumes that "commercial activity" is the rule, and commons tending the exception.

Nothing could be more unnatural to human beings.

The opposite is the case, that we engage in...

... commercial activity - hold down jobs - because commons tending needs to either fly under the radar (fully legal stuff: I bake a cake and invite my neighbours, for example), or disguise itself as commercial activity via hacks.

Because commons tending as a primary activity is not imaginable nor imagined by law.

So what the future of FLOSS needs to do in the short term is to commoditize those hacks that make the disguise work, to enable much easier access to them.

@smallcircles @ocdtrekkie I've also been on the corporate side of FLOSS licensing more than once, and I think a fair few licenses don't actually serve businesses all *that* well.

Nor does SPDX's license list, FWIW.

Though CC doesn't apply well to code, at least the CC framework is very explicit about what your rights and obligations under a license are. Other licenses need to be analyzed to arrive at the same understanding. That alone is a major hurdle to clear.

@ocdtrekkie @jens
The licensing of a software component is but a strategic choice. It depends.

I think a lot boils down to the formation of collaboration networks that are based on true and well-earned trust, where relationships rely on trustworthiness of our partners that have been proven over time.

The definition SX uses for social networking as "any direct and indirect human activity between people" is very useful here. Because we know quite well how to foster these trust networks offline. People do social networking for 1,000's of years.

Only online we suddenly make it all weird. Our tech still hampers us to be social, narrows our social bandwidth in communication.

Software development is social networking, and way beyond the often seen gut reaction of "pff, github stars". Software is useless if it doesn't match the (social) needs of its stakeholders. Coding is social, and social coders social code the social code (of society).

My hobby and fascination.

@ocdtrekkie @jens
One major issue is lack of shared vision in our technology ecosystems. Without having basic shared understanding of the future we are cocreating together, a vision that includes technological, cultural, economical, as well as ecological perspectives, all we're creating is coldhearted tech that any bad actor can just plug into. Pure technosphere.

Unfortunately creating hard technospheres is still seen as a hallmark of societal progress. It fits hypercapitalism best, measured in GDP. That tech innovation equates to progress is a deep dogma that only now we are slowly coming to realize how utterly detrimental that thinking is to global society and humankind as a whole.

Richly late, and now urgency causes us to not seeing the forest between the trees.

The gradual mindset shift that comes with practicing Social experience design is first of all the awareness how *humongous* the gap is between all our shiny tech and that what people truly need.

@smallcircles @ocdtrekkie @jens I think the lack of a shared vision is an expression of different ideologies. We frame it as tech and handwave it as privacy protection, or data sovereignity. It's still encoding our values that we grew up with.

“The code we create and the tools we use can help or harm humanity. We write our political values into our code”

I think we have to be careful in calling for a shared vision, it is similar to calls for a big tent.

apc.org/en/news/librecast-buil…

Librecast on building the next-generation internet: “The code we create and the tools we use can help or harm humanity. We write our political values into our code”

This month we speak to Esther Payne, community manager and privacy advocate at Librecast. The organisation develops free and open-source (FOSS) software to enable multicast transmitting data to groups simultaneously without depending on a centralised…

^{Association for Progressive Communications}

I don't think it is, just posted on the other branch of the thread. You just cannot specify it in detail, and it must be *carried* vision between all participants.

Like we might have had a shared vision that involved being able to defend the fediverse from an undesirable corporate capture. You can say that that vision sorta kinda existed, but more as that handwaving. As a "yeah, it is decentralized, all FOSS, organically grown which lends some resilience", but leaving it at that observation instead of safeguarding the direction towards the vision. Which would require levels of coordinating and collaboration we are currently unable to muster.

@smallcircles I think it might be a wording thing.

A vision, even if it is very vague and abstract, is meant to show a direction. I do not think that FLOSS folk all going in the same direction is helpful, actually. That way lies systemd and similar madness.

The problem of those directions is that it's impossible to cater to everyone's needs, and so things that are "too niche" get shaved off. In the end, systemd et. al. benefit only those who are happy...

@onepict @ocdtrekkie @APC @NGIZero

@smallcircles ... to accept the limitations of a framework, and agree to only move within its bounds. It stifles innovation.

The strength of grassroots movements is that they do not require a shared vision. They just require low barriers to opportunistic collaboration.

The thing we see right now, for example, with the LLM-vs-no-LLM positions is that letting AI slop into your codebase hinders opportunistic collaboration, whereas AI slop free code can be...

@onepict @ocdtrekkie @APC @NGIZero

@smallcircles ... used even in AI slop projects. Whether or not that is good is not the point.

The point is, there is no need to ask for permission here: we have used licenses and SLOP.md to signal to each other where our values lie; sharing is easy when the other parties exist within those boundaries.

The signals are not particularly well defined, though, and - as we were discussing earlier - go beyond a mere license choice. The rights and obligations...

@onepict @ocdtrekkie @APC @NGIZero

@smallcircles of a license are one such signal, a SLOP.md file might be another.

For none of this do we need a shared vision.

@onepict @ocdtrekkie @APC @NGIZero

@jens @ocdtrekkie
I'm not talking about a framework. A vision is merely guidance, direction, something to keep course on so you don't end up where you didn't intend to be. It can be value alignment to an extent. Generally it means monitor that which is important to you. Vision is asked for when things extend well beyond a single initiative and many autonomous parties are involved.

Other than that, I don't like the word myself. I like dreams better. Everyone has dreams, and it is okay if dreams change over time. Dreams are personal, vision is collective. A person having a vision often turns unhealthy to the person, as people tend to cling to them. It is better to just follow dreams.

I agree that low barriers to opportunistic collaboration are vital to strength of a movement. But not any chaotic grassroots growth necessarily ends up with desirable outcomes. Visions and dreams are helpful concepts to think about emergence of a healthy commons based value economy.

@jens @ocdtrekkie
I find it quite remarkable that in all those years I have been active for ActivityPub and the fediverse there's been hardly a word about the vision for fediverse. Hardly any visionary thought about the future of social networking. "This is how the fediverse may look 10 years from now", none of that.

But if you say that fedi lies open and unprotected to corporate takeover and capture, then you get many outraged "No no no, that is impossible!" because .. what exactly? Yea, decentralized, FOSS, nice people, yada yada.

What is really happening right now is that a couple million fedizens are test-driving FOSS projects in pioneer and early adopter stages of the technology adoption lifecycle, and we are all really priming the market.

If in 10 years time fedi is a corporate surveillance capitalist AI agent hellhole, we shouldn't complain. We did as we always did: deliver the FOSS with the license.

Unless we reimagine social, envision a peopleverse.

@smallcircles @ocdtrekkie "I'm not talking about a framework. A vision is merely guidance, direction, something to keep course on so you don't end up where you didn't intend to be. It can be value alignment to an extent. Generally it means monitor that which is important to you. Vision is asked for when things extend well beyond a single initiative and many autonomous parties are involved."

But that *is* a framework, in the sense that individual activities are meant to...

@smallcircles @ocdtrekkie ... fit into the parameters that you monitor.

That's precisely what people tend to disagree with.

I also am frustrated that this sometimes results in multiple incompatible solutions, but that is infinitely more preferable to a situation in which alternatives cannot be easily explored because some alignment effort doesn't account for it.

There are ways that allow evolution from there to a single approach that covers all use cases, but that...

@smallcircles @ocdtrekkie ... order of divergence first, convergence later is the messy but powerful path.

That's at least why I think that "shared vision" is too big, because it tries to skip the divergence step. I don't think that's ever worked well.

@jens @ocdtrekkie
> order of divergence first, convergence later is the messy but powerful path

This is the gist of my last blog post. Both go hand in hand, and there's a sweet spot to be found between laissez-faire grassroots freedom and chaos, and ensuring certain levels of interop. Last couple years on the fedi saw mostly divergence in what effectively is a big ball of mud anti-pattern, accepting app-specific protocol decay to become de facto standard. It turned ActivityPub from something powerful into something limited. Yes, its enough for some people, many others left, and for newcomers it isn't very attractive.

As for vision, you can have it at any level and discuss with others to get to fresh ideas and direction. Social media ain't social? Well, we can envision what it means to be social then. A peopleverse, where unobtrusive technology serves people's needs. Envisionable. Joyful creation, how can social networks support cocreation in a commons. Doable.