The pseudomoral contest.
In youth, when you are very idealistic and not very cynical, you tend to accept with a certain ease the game of moral categories, that is, the game of "good/bad". The problem with this game arises when you try to apply these categories in a divisive model, that is, in a model that is applicable in politics.
An example is the race to swear that never, ever, ever, the administrator of an instance in the fediverse will federate with the Evil Threads, product of EVIL, or Meta.
I've already written about the fact that "it has the activitypub interface" doesn't mean it can federate (due to protocol ambiguity), and the fact that even if it could, "it can federate" doesn't mean it wants to. , much less that he will.
But the real problem is that a political game based on moral categories has been inserted into it.
If you have an instance on the Fediverse, you've been using one of the 5/6 pieces of software that are actually capable of federating well. So, you're just some ordinary idiot. Even if you have written a truly anti-fascist, entirely pro-LGBTQWERTZUIOPÜASDFGHJKLÖÄYXCVBNM*-°^~ moderation policy, congratulations: you are only one of the 2/3000 who have the same policy. And not even the cool background of your instance will make a difference.
But then, if you are little kids used to proving that you are better than the rest of us, how will you stand out? How can you tell the rest of the world that your instance is better than the others? How do you buy an SUV, for fediverse instances?
The most childish, or perhaps adolescent, solution is to say that you are the good ones, the hoplites of good, and that by entering the instance you will enlist in the forces of GOOD.
But at this point you will hit your head against a nice concrete pillar: first of all, GOOD is inflated. Every badass group on the planet, including Satanists, tries to prove the same thing: "we are good"
I tell you the truth: if there was a single group, even Specter, willing to announce that they were evil, bad guys, the Department of Evil, anything that didn't produce any benefit, I would join it tomorrow.
Unfortunately, not even the most hardened Satanists admit that they are on the side of evil: they come up with pathetic opportunisms like "freedom", "free will", and other bullshit that all seem to state the same thing: they accuse us of being evil , but in reality we are good. No one who says “okay, we are evil. We love ingrown toenails and wish you hemorrhoids. We are bad, despicable, we do nothing good and useful, we do not represent anything positive and we work for evil, for worse and also for carbonara with pineapple".
But no: since everyone says they are good, or at least beneficial, or positive, and that they have a good fight to carry on, everyone has an idea of good, and if you don't see it you are wrong or evil.
So, although we have had plenty of good guys since the Triassic, everyone tries to be good. And if you understand what it means to have a kind of Istanbul bazaar full of good people shouting out their goodness, you will be able to understand one thing: those who have the "demand for good people" find themselves with immense company and even greater competition.
But there are shortcuts.
For example, if you say that someone is evil, and you say that you hate him, then you can say “we are his enemies, and since we fight against evil, then we are necessarily the good ones”.
Since no one has ever demonstrated that moral categories enjoy the transitive property, much less the aggregative one, it doesn't work: Hitler and Stalin were enemies, but saying that Hitler was evil doesn't help us to think that Stalin was good. (although, I myself would order an extermination if I had ten million Clemente Mastellas in my country. And you too)
However, they delude themselves that if A is good, then A's enemy is evil.
So they say: hey, META is EVIL, and since we solemnly swear not to federate with META (EVIL) then we are necessarily "THE GOOD". Doc. Docg.
In solemnly vowing never to federate with Threads, the implicit message is “we are GOOD”. Why'? What's different about you? The answer is “I hate META”.
And I know very well what you will answer me if I ask “why hate META”. None of the answers have ever convinced me. For several reasons.
1. “Because he spies on us”. If you short-armed stinkers of shit hadn't pretended that companies on the internet were non-profit organizations, offering free services, social networks probably wouldn't have to pretend to be free, and then find a loophole based on data. Now you would pay for a subscription to Facebook, and therefore in order not to have its customers stolen, Facebook would be forced to protect their data.
2. “Because he doesn't have the same pure ideals as me:” you don't have them either, so much so that to demonstrate that you are good, you are forced to charge an enemy and work by comparison. What the hell are we talking about?
3. “Why Facebook does it _for profit_: the devil's dung, etc.” Give me the address of your employer, so that I can inform him that you disdain profit, and that you are willing not to work for profit, that is, for free. I am convinced that you will be very willing to work for profit.
4. “Because they are dangerous for democracy”: the only ones who are dangerous for democracy are evidently the voters, not the social network. The social network does not vote. It can spread bullshit, sure: in fact, we had never heard bullshit before Facebook. Zuckerberg clearly invented them. Never seen a mendacious mass media before. Really. Did you know that communists eat children?
5. “Because they have too much power”: sure, not as much as a cop who beats you to death in a barracks, not as much as an employer who makes you work for pennies, not as much as a fucking landlord that increases your rent, not as much as an anti-abortion doctor who becomes a conscientious objector in the hospital, not as much power as any other power you suffer every day without saying a word. And do you know why Facebook is evil? Because if you say you hate Facebook, nothing happens to you. If you say you hate your slave employer, he fires you. If you say you hate the fascist cop, bad things will happen to you. The same if you struggle against any other excessive power. Except META. Who at most responds by profiling you as a "pain in the ass". If you want to present yourself as people who fight against excesses of power, well: you are not very credible.
6. Because it does nothing against hate. Aha. The epic stories of how you have curbed hatred have not reached my ears. Will you update me?
7. “Because they force people to go to them, even if they don't want to”. Not like when you changed your computer just because "it was too slow", by pure chance, when it worked exactly as it did when you bought it. And not like when you change clothes because they're no longer in fashion. Not like those times when you change your iPhone with a new model identical to the old one, to the point that sooner or later Apple will take itself to court for plagiarism. Ninth. “THEY” DO IT.
I could go on and on, but what you apparently forget is that _proving that someone is evil is as difficult and elusive as proving that they are good_. Especially since you want to prove that someone is evil, only to then prove IN COMPARISON that they are good. The trouble is that so, after having struggled and probably failed to prove that someone is EVIL, you then find yourself in the even more difficult situation of _comparing with yourself_
Honestly, I'll tell you one thing. I'm so fed up with "good", _and especially with its sycophants_, that I would get a Facebook account if only I were truly convinced that it was EVIL. And if Elon Musk were himself "EVIL", instead of an overrated idiot, who is rich because he is overrated and overrated because he is rich, I would even get a Twitter account.
Because you see, if all four billion social network users in the world moved to the fediverse tomorrow, you would need about 4,000 times more servers than you do today. And your ridiculous connections, even domestic ones, your cheap instances, or in Amazon's "free tier", would not be enough.
And you would find yourself making a choice: pay two/three euros a month, or the instance will be forced to sell advertising. Those two or three euros that you would never pay, not even for Whatsapp or Telegram.
To be good, you have done far too much harm.