Its not clear if that is due to:

i) competition from proprietary business models

ii) more specifically the excessive concentration of said proprietary business models ("big tech")

iii) confusion from conflicting objectives and monetisation incentives (the various types of licenses etc)

iv) ill-adapted funding models (venture capital)

v) intrinsic to the concept and there is no solution

vi) just not having matured yet enough

What I am driving at is that building more complex structures requires some solid foundations and those typically require building blocks following some proven blueprint. Somehow much around open source is still precarious and made up. Ideally you'd want to walk into the chamber of commerce (or maybe the chamber of open source entities), pick a name, a legal entity type, a sector and get going. You focus on your solutions, not on how to survive in a world that doesn't quite know what to make of you.

Now, corporate structures and capital markets etc took hundreds of years to settle (and are still flawed in many ways) but we do live in accelerated times so maybe its just a matter of getting our act together?

to make it plain to you, there were thousands of slave traders who dedicated their lives to the topic, including e.g. how to optimally fill-up the ship with bodies. what does this prove?

the idea that meticulous pursuit of a domain somehow gives it its experts the moral high ground or ensures that they will keep it safe for society is so bizarre and alarming it only reinforces the notion that a bunch of people have become completely unhinged

AI practitioners have already proved themselves untrustworthy by putting themselves in the service of entities that invaded privacy and engaged in large scale algorithmic manipulation of e.g. voting. This is not an assumption. Its a dire fact.

More broadly, corporate structures have repeatedly proved themselves untrustworthy, both in the small, with scandals and fraud and at-large, with regulatory capture that ensured their negative impacts on society could go unhindered for decades

Reddit like forums, open source self-hosting, federation, these are all good points but people need to see how they make a difference in practice.

Mastodon somehow managed to be seen as a less toxic version of twitter, though it might be mostly peoples wish than anything intrinsic to the platform.

But all new entrants in the fediverse party will have to think how to convince people that social media are actually worth the hassle

Despite appearances, if the metaverse gambit in the current episode made any sense it was mostly as a defensive move: To obtain control over a device so that you can datamine at will and perpetuate your business model irrespective of what other major actors might come up with.

Think about it. If stars (you have little control over) align, device owners can flip a privacy switch here, introduce a policy there and annihilate your business.

To paraphrase Ballmer: Devices, devices, devices

how much more performance can you squeeze from an individual that:

i) is not intrinsic to who they are (hence visible when you hire them - if its not the right profile just don't hire them)

ii) is not tied to your own bloated structure, toxic culture and messed up processes and hence none of their fault

is that 10%, 20% extra performance? is that sufficient to satisfy the "markets"? when its your vision and business model is what is really the problem.

Where are the people that can articulate an actually desirable digital future and rally everybody (including those exclusively focused on pecuniary matters) around a human-centric vision?

what is your definition of "progress"

thanks, that is comforting

> the cat is out of the bag even if you don't like it

thanks for bullying us around

> the legitimately talented AI thinkers

who exactly authorised you to project legitimacy in a space that has not seen any regulation?

Same, e.g. with Mastodon as a Twitter replacement. It something working, that normal people can migrate to and break the stanglehold of the true oppressive platforms. No harm to keep expectations high for those "alternatives", but lets keep a sense of proportion.

The other side of lazy private profits from "riding the yield curve" or which-ever else inane business model is recurrent crises and social costs, sometimes overt, sometimes obscure.

Arbitrary and ad-hoc explicit or implicit insurance schemes and put options, obfuscation and complexity, moral hazards and perverse incentives under every carpet.

A fair and democratic society, especially in the hyperconnected digital age must very seriously consider the wiring of the monetary/credit system. The rule should be simplicity, transparency and working hard for the money: return strictly coupled to risk.

Core to a better design will almost certaintly have to be the concept of risk free deposits with the central bank that are not subject to runs. The rest needs to be worked out.

These accounts pay strictly zero but can never default.

Anybody who wants to get a return can deposit with a private bank but then they need to monitor that bank because if it mismanages risk they are on the hook.

The thing to understand is that private banks are experts at risk free profiteering and passing the buck, not at managing risks which is really hard work

The monetary system is an absurd and unfair anachronism and it lurches from disaster to disaster.

Thats a wrong statement. You are thinking of money as a public good and thats how it should be, but thats not what it is now. Your claim is against a private enterprize.

You could have access to risk free sovereign money with the central bank and its entirely possible. But private banks are livid against it because it would deprive them of precisely the kind of game that blew up in their face with rising interest rates and discounted government securities.

Ultimately this is not about idiot VC depositors and whether they deserve a haircut or not. Its about idiot bank managers and whether they deserve extracting rents from the entire economy doing basically nothing.

The only decent thing would be to remove the bank's freedom to (mis)manage interest risk altogether, have sovereign money deposits with the central bank and force private banks actually work for their profits by properly managing risks

Thats not the definition of a customer, thats the definition of an investor.

The fact that it is supposed to be a low risk low return investment does not change that fundamental relation.

Tech is far, far more than social or search. Most of it requires significant levels of trust between tech provider and tech consumer. It also requires that the tech consumer pays and therefore has some influence over the service, in a virtuous circle of demand and supply.

Despite absurd claims that people just want "free stuff", people pay through their noses for 1) hardware, 2) software and 3) bandwidth - the entire stack that makes the internet (and therefore search and social) possible.

The idea that they don't want to pay specifically for these "last mile" trinkets of search or social (that in reality have no option but to pay with private data) does not stand scrutiny.

The adtech gambit was so lucrative and it managed to buy so many consciences that people have normalized it. Yet it is a disastrous model that does not scale to deliver the promise that we all feel is within reach.

The simple fact is that for tech to flourish somebody must pull the plug on surveillance capitalism. The sooner the better.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Zuboff

[0] https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/astronomy-qu...