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What app is so useful, you can’t believe it’s free? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] kibiz0r 1 points 1 year ago

For sure. There are two specific problems I see:

Discord shouldn’t be the only client you can use to access the communities
Discord shouldn’t be the only host you can use to create and run the communities

I don’t see any problem with Discord being the most widely-used client and/or server host, nor with Discord selling premium features and doing analytics in order to sell those more effectively.

The general problem here is lack of interop.

But like, I can’t get too upset at Discord specifically. They wanted to make something cool, they did, they seem to be doing it about as ethically as you can while still making a living in this frenzied tech VC culture we’ve encouraged through basically free money for investment and insane speculative finance instruments.

Things will improve. It seems like we’re hitting the next tech bubble. And at the same time, there’s a consumer (and governmental) backlash against data hoarding, walled gardens, and anti-interop mechanisms.

I’ll say though: “depends on a single private entity that we trust”… that’ll pretty much always be a piece of internet life. Whether it’s a for-profit or non-profit entity, if you’re sharing infrastructure then you’re also sharing trust.

People lately — especially crypto bros — have been saying “trust” like it’s a bad word. It’s not. Trust is essential to the human experience, and we need to be okay with trusting each other. But what we have right now in big tech is not trust, but coercion.

The answer to that is not a new monolithic “zero trust” model, but an array of alternatives. Some private, some public. That can be built on top of a skeptical framework, like the web, but the eventual user-facing part of it needs trust in order to function.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.