Freedom is such a vague word, we shouldn’t use this word if we want to be precise about what we mean by it.

When we talk about free software, we point to transparency, studyability, tinkerability and sharability. The openness to allow ourselves to use our tools with freedom.

However, I do not think we should use the term open source. The reason for my distancing of the word source is because the word makes us think about development instead of the end user. Because if we want these kinds of software to appeal to the masses, we the word to emphasize that it is meant for them. Instead, I would use the term open software, open tool or open machine.

EDIT: More precise titles.

The way we sort comments on lemmy today is through giving everyone the ability to up and downvote any comment. You upvote comments you want to be more visible and downvote comments you want to have less visibility.

I think ranking comments are great if some opinions contribute more.

Imagine the value of a comment can be determined before voting. Perhaps with a panel of judges. With rankings -10 to 10 where -10 is dangerous misinformation, 0 has no meaningful contribution and 10 is perhaps mindblowingly enlightening or empowering.

Example of lemmy style sorting

Lets say a post is submitted. On the first day, it received the comments with a judges score (user, score):

(monkey, 8), (zebra, -2), (horse, 5), (panda, 3), (rhino, 3).

A post get the most visibility the first day. Therefore, those who post early can get a lot of votes.

However on the second day, one user submitted the comment:

(Flower, 9)

A this point in time the post doesnt have that many voters. And the top comments has increased visibility, so for every vote flower gains, the top comment might have received another. So we end up with the final ranking:

Monkey, horse, panda, flower, rhino, zebra.

So it ends up only ranking similar to panda and rhino even though the score was much higher. There was a mismatch between votes and score.

Solution, the topoligical sort

We should concider moving away from voting on comments individually to voting comparatively. Where you perhaps determine the most valuable comment out of a selection. Then a topological sort can put the best comment on top.

So even if flower is late to the party, their insight is still spread.

I'm interested in a complimentary federated service for peertube and similar services. One can subscribe to creators and instances. You can't create independent posts, because it is solely made as a subscription service. However you can comment on creations.

It is intended as a tool to keep track of creators you are interested in, and have a seamless experience with going from one video to the next and be able to post quick comments.

I'm envisioning that this service could be distributed and serverless like Scuttlebutt. That way, there would be no signup process involved. One could then download software/ app for your phone and start adding instances and creators.

To comment, one would perhaps need some verification system, like connecting your app to a user to avoid misuse.

A service like this would act similar to an federated RSS, but with more flexibility.

I believe a service like this would be superior to any subscription solution we have today, that be through RSS, peertube,

I believe this would bring a lot of utility to the fediverse. It would make it far easier to develop new federated projects. And it would be a great gateway into the fediverse. It would make it far easier to interact with content which would make the fediverse look more populated and more exciting.

If you think this is a good idea, say aye in the comments.

No corporations, no profit based businesses, no state. Only non-profit organizations. Would this be communism?

If so, could this possibly be self-sustainable? How can such decentralized society structure possibly self sustain without the threat of centralization?