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Watching Twitter burn down has been entertaining, and got me thinking about how important production methods are.
I donât really mean âproduction methodsâ - I mean something larger, but smaller than ideology. I mean how a full ecosystem cooperates with its own parts, now how a part (like a business) organizes itself.
Twitter has a lot of admins, which costs a lot of money. One-to-one, Mastodon has fewer admins, devs, security folk, and the like. Despite this, moderation on Mastodon is clearly better. Development has been fast, securityâs such that Iâve never heard of an exploit.
If you ask someone who thinks purely in terms of the Twitterâs production methods, âhow would an open source, community-build, alternative work?â, they might tell you itâd be too expensive. What community could possibly pay for all those servers, admins, and deal with all the legal questions?
Mastodon doesnât work through massive sums of cash. However you want to explain the eco-system, the bottom line here is that the open community model has never struggled with funding. This isnât down to the micro-scale of a business - Twitter and Facebook donât have much to learn from the open source community. They couldnât take notes on building a furry-fandom, and adding Content Warnings, then build a nicer space. The Content Warnings exist as a synthesis between users who wanted to talk about sensitive subjects, and users who didnât want to see certain subjects. Twitter could easily implement the feature, but they cannot ask the community to generate those ideas, because those users donât know how to use Twitter in any way outside requesting features; when requesting, all voices are equal - but when people need features, they implement it themselves.
The split in methods reminds me of the time a government decided to ârescueâ the Mbuti - a hunting people, around mid-Africa. The government decided to rescue them from a life in the forest, and gifted them farming equipment and seeds. The Mbuti said âthanksâ, ate the seeds, and left.
From the governmentâs point of view, they had wasted their gifts. From the Mbutiâs point of view, the government were so dim they couldnât see the food in front of them, then went to hunt more food in the forest.
The production methods donât have any direct parallels to FOSS communities vs corporations. My point here is that the basic cultural assumptions about how one does things result in such different results that they call our ability to measure results into question.
Who could have made the most food with those seeds? The Mbuti never asked this question, so it seems to fall flat.
How much does a developer cost per hour? Again, this question really doesnât get raised much in the Fediverse.