Humanity has two existential threats: our disregard for the environment and our disregard for eath other

[alberto]

@tomab

Maybe this is along the lines of eco-villages and the technologies that can enhance and support those principles - maybe it is to start to identify opportunities to weave those kind of principles into society as it currently stands rather than create a new eco-village environments from scratch.

Maybe I need to be more specific here. I was thinking of fairly concrete technical choices. A good example is how the Scuttlebutt community deprioritized support for multiple device accounts. Why? Because it’s a first world problem. “First world techies” with multiple devices are not the demographics SSB is meant to serve. The whole story, as I understand it, is here. The take home point is:

@alberto

The builders of Scuttlebutt started from the sort of human community they wanted to build : open to the underprivileged, solving basic social connectivity problems while staying away from surveillance capitalism, etc., and on those basis they are making all their technical choices , right down to the editor. As they do that, they discover and exploit sources of economic efficiency (“underprivileged audiences are less demanding, easier to serve with open source tech”). They ended up with a very different product from the ones they are seeking to replace, and with a very different community. Diaspora still feels Facebook-ish: Scuttlebutt feels completely different, to me at least.