If the protocol doesn’t give incentives for an even distribution of users, it’s not going to be solved by blaming individual instances or individual users.

There’s no evidence to support what you’re talking about. Mastodon, Misskey and Lemmy monthly active users flatlined a long ago. They are not growing and there’s no evidence they will resume to grow in these conditions.

A multi-protocol network might not be unlikely, but it will still be very asymetric, with AP as a secondary actor. Power shapes technology, not the other way around.

I wouldn’t say the fediverse is established. It’s a very small and niche phenomenon compared to mainstream social media. By now it’s clear it’s not going to ever grow to an impactful size. It’s here to stay, but it will stay as a minor, geeky thing.

This scenario would also be aligned with the goals of this initiative. I don’t think they see a problem with it. The majority of the signatories are techno-optimist liberals who believe the good tech bros should be in control of society’s discourse to prevent the American empire from collapsing. Billionaries are evil because they are enemy of the status quo.

Well, if they build enough leverage, they could force Bluesky to adopt a version of AT that is less skewed in their favor. Protocol details are easy to change when you have only one adopter, lol. Not sure this is part of their strategy though.

Also you seem to be thinking that anybody involved in this (the fediverse, bluesky, this initiative) follow a logic of commoning, where this money will be spent to improve the technical protocol itself. I don’t think this is the goal at all here. They want to change the power structure in the world of social media and integrating with AT is just a tool for that, that might change going forward. AT is interesting only insofar it supports their goal, but the interest of the “AT commons” (which for what I know is basically non-existant) is a secondary concern for now.

Would it though? I really don’t care about AT, but from their perspective, any € spent on AT will matter incredibly more than on AP. AP is a mature ecosystem, with a lot of complex interests, endless dialects and a lot of mess to grapple with. AT is basically not a protocol yet and can be shaped a lot more.

They are exactly the people that have always been advocating for this stuff all along. They are doing their thing. Nothing to be surprised of

You cannot fork or edit the code, it’s just “source-available”.

I think for your use case, Anytype is good enough, but it’s not FOSS. Obsidian is also not FOSS. I’m not a purist, quite the contrary (in fact I use Notion), but maybe you want to check what’s behind.

Also, to help you make sense of your confusion and take a better decision, you’re comparing a bit apples and oranges.

Some of the tools, like Obsidian, are purely knowledge-management software with some productivity features sticked on top (like kanban visualizations).

Coda, Appflowy and Notion are primarily tools to build software, which can be knowledge-management software, productivity software or other stuff. They operate on a higher level of abstraction and flexibility, but out-of-the-box, for a single user, they are also probably worse than stuff like Obsidian.

yey, more friends to chat with.

Well, Obsidian, Notion, Anytype, Affine can give you a hint of possible directions in this transition. While they still retain document-oriented features, like the concept of Page, they also try to really go for a much richer experience that does away with the limitations inherited from paper-based solutions. Double-linking, composability, fractal properties of pages and nesting (especially in Notion and Anytype), block-based UI, seamless integration of text, databases, and embeds, heavy use of transclusion and other stuff like that.

I would say this alternative system is far from cohesive and mature, but it’s clear some software is emancipating itself from whatever Onlyoffice represents.

Maybe you would find this video interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXiQlLHuK7g

I am sure that some people wouldn’t like the fact that the interface runs as a webapp, or use of Java, but it’s strange to me that it’s not usually even in the conversation.

A point about conversations, rather than the software itself. I think it’s not really at the forefront of the discussion because this kind of software caters kinda to “legacy” organizational environments that want a 1 to 1 replacement for Google Docs or Microsoft 365, which is not the sexiest problem. In the community of adopters of NextCloud (poor souls…) the discussion between onlyoffice and collabora, together with their integration with NC, is a quite common topic but again, most of these deal with orgs and not individual adoption and I would say that’s a very distinct crowd from most “hackerinos” who populate the FOSS online communities.

That said, a lot of the discourse is now focused on moving away entirely from document-based (and even document-oriented) software, because there’s a shared understanding that the problem is in the approach itself, and what IBM, Apple and Microsoft considered a reasonable way to handle information in the '80s, is not necessarily the best way now.

solarpunk is inherently utopian. Utopias exist to inspire and to reflect on the present. It tells us that there can be a social system in which technology is good, but then if to be optimistic or not is very subjective. Many pessimistic people like utopias exactly because they highlight the ugliness of reality.

The core difference between longtermism and solarpunk is that longtermism stems from an utilitarian frame, while solarpunk rejects it. Radical utilitarianism like longtermist fashos and oligarchs gives them a way out to commit the worst crimes against humanity because of a supposed good that will materialize in a distant future. It’s a moral free pass, exploiting the life of future humans (who cannot protest) to justify the oppression and exploitation of current humans (who are indeed protesting these assholes).

Solarpunk and longtermism are in no way on the same spectrum.

Techno-optimism has always been used to criticize this attitude, together with techno-chauvinism. Techno-utopianism is a less loaded term that might encompass more positive visions of technology, like the attitude towards space exploration in the 60’s coming from the soviet union.

“Optimism” in general is not necessarily the term we want to reclaim from the right: it’s wishy-washy, boring, mediocre. “I’m not going to do much, I’ll be on autopilot, because tech is good and it will sort stuff out. I don’t care too much about taking a position, beyond passively trusting tech”. Optimism is the happy trust of a dog on a leash going for a walk.

Months? You clearly haven’t tried Pyanodons.

Jokes aside, yeah, it would be a killer.

If you’re wondering, no Appflowy cannot be used to replace Notion. It’s in their claim but you would have a pretty bad time doing it. Anytype might one day get there, Appflowy is another thing.

None. I’m used to Notion and unfortunately there’s no OSS even getting close to that. I would like to move away, but even if I considered to lose my current base or move everything manually, there’s nothing feature-rich enough to meet my use cases.

They just allocate according to different logic than the mainstream american FOSS ideology. For instance, hackerbros, and you seem to say the same, will tell you that resources should be centralized into the biggest project in its own category to add more and more features to it. Regardless of cooptation from the private sector, this is generally a bad idea. It leads to a monoculture and monoculture leads to critical bugs impacting enormous amount of users. Also it’s predicated on the idea that there should be only a single way to fullfill a specific use-case, and that it’s the same throughout the world, erasing cultural, economic, social, biological and political differences. Optimization requires standardization, standardization requires erasure and suppression of minoritarian voices and it’s therefore oppressive. Maximizing it is not a good idea, both for technical, political and ethical reasons.

Seeding new projects that better fit local contexts, or simply produce diverse alternatives raises diversity and in turns raises resilience of the software ecosystem as a whole.

There has been for years: NLNet. It just got suspended by right-wingers. A lot of European projects were relying on it.