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Building, or using, Mastodon or Lemmy rather than big tech owned centralised communication social media is in itself a major political stand of course.
by fulafel 3y ago
Building, or using, Mastodon or Lemmy rather than big tech owned centralised communication social media is in itself a major political stand of course.
- rglullis 3y agoWhy?
- danShumway 3y agoDepends on how you define politics. Some people think about politics in terms of power relationships, in which case ActivityPub is a statement about user agency/ownership. Some people take those same power dynamics and look at ActivityPub as a statement about decentralization/centralization. Some people (not all but some) view ActivityPub as a statement about monetization and Capitalism more broadly, esp about the privatization of communication/data. I'm not going to say everyone using ActivityPub is making a political statement[0], but a lot of people using ActivityPub are pretty consciously making at statement that I think could reasonably be described as political. Worth remembering in these conversations that a nontrivial number of people view even just making a choice to use Open Source software over proprietary software even in situations where proprietary alternatives might be more polished as a political statement on its own. I think ActivityPub is easier to view through a political lens than Open Source software in general is, so it's not surprising to me that an even larger portion of its users would look at it that way. ---- [0]: Although some people do define politics so broadly that they might say that.