I bought a size of pizza from a food truck in DC and it was so bad I threw it away. Which is saying a lot for pizza

Oh yeah, Cherry Springs State Park in Pennsylvania is cool. Probably not “worth traveling there from some other state before leaving the country” cool, but cool. https://maps.app.goo.gl/SQp261ecxj7exAJy8

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to argue centralization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. It’s everywhere. The U.S. left Afghanistan and was replaced by a different centralized entity. One could argue how decentralized those “tribes” were, but regardless, after the U.S. departure they recreated a similar structure.

Complexity comes hand in hand with size. The OP is a chart of the different email providers. Can an individual run their own email server? Yes. And doesn’t it get more difficult after a certain number of users and require hiring specialists? Yes. But still, such large services exist, and a majority of users turn to them.

If the fediverse lives there will always be small servers, but we can expect to see really big ones. If we don’t want them to be corporate recreations of gmail and yahoo and hotmail I’d argue we should figure out a platform co-op/worker co-op model, including the necessary funding and specialists.

My argument isn’t about the fediverse specifically. It’s that centralization is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and the lack of friction resulting from centralization can make it more competitive.

What is the reason the cost per user of hosting a Lemmy server goes up after a few thousand users? If it were say, you need more expensive hardware, that doesn’t necessarily disprove my argument. Just because a bigger investment is needed doesn’t mean it’s not cheaper per user or not more competitive. Just that you or I don’t have the capital, or that we might see centralization bad because we have bad experiences with centralized entities.

Also just because something is more competitive doesn’t mean it’s morally or aesthetically more desirable. The specialized army fed and trained by an empire overruns the brave and happy tribe of hunter gatherers.

What I’m saying is since we know the phenomenon of centralization occurs, we should try to subvert it as much as possible by introducing democratic structures.

We should have large semi-centralized services. But they should be democratically controlled.

Do you ever think about why cities form? Rural life has a lot of appealing characteristics, plus it’s the starting state of the world. Cities form because there is an advantage to size, proximity and specialization. If we had a new planet and completely evenly distributed the population across its land, we’d very quickly form cities regardless.

It’s the same with centralized services. It takes a lot of special knowledge and equipment to run an email service. The average Lemmy user may have those resources, but even here, how many of us run our own email servers?

It costs less per person in resources to add more users after the first one. So there’s an incentive to aggregate users together. And once you have a certain number of users, maybe you figure out some way to fund your operation, and you can pay more people to add features/capabilities. Soon your entity not only has more users, it’s more appealing than a plan vanilla email service, and you get even more users. You’re doing it cheaper and better than the DIYers.

I think centralization and size are naturally occurring. We should think about ways to exist and benefit from them, so something like Gmail but run as a worker cooperative.

In countries that are ostensibly democracies to justify your actions you have to claim you have majority support. Any crowd of people is a threat to that perception, so it makes sense (in a shitty way) that we see the “paid protestors” attack so often.

I’m not a lawyer, but best I can tell from this language, the law is the person operating the plane has to make sure there are seats with restraints, while the people are responsible for using them during takeoff and landing.

I get that for liability reasons, no airline wants to expose themselves by landing without people in their seats. Going further, I interpreted the comment above mine to be saying planes might run out of fuel if the passenger didn’t exit the bathroom. My point was no pilot is going to let the plane crash because someone is in the bathroom.

Maybe they don’t want to land the plane with someone in the bathroom, but I have a hard time believing they can’t.

You’re doing all the stuff you suggested too, right?