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So I came across this paragraph from Solderpunk's latest post and it resonated with me, because it -is- me.
I'll explain first by quoting it. If you want the whole post, here it is.
> There was *plenty* of anarcho-capitalist and libertarian political philosophy on the early internet. But **without any direct experience of being part of that kind of community,** and **without a political stance that makes you question commercialism and corporatism** as a default reaction to seeing them, then what would motivate you to seek something like smolnet/Outernet out, and **if you stumbled upon it** what would stop you seeing it as strange and quaint and backwards and slow and **populated by nut jobs** who think that stuff you have done your entire life without a second thought is actually the work of the devil?
> **emphasis added**
I discovered the smolnet sometime in either late 2019 or 2020; I frankly don't remember when I first got my account at the Soviet at Circumlunar.Space. And, joke intended with the name, I kinda figured what I was getting into would wind up being a technically interesting but politically rotten orgy of people screaming about capitalism, as if sitting on a pubnix in the dark corners of the internet and yelling about change would actually enact it.
In fact, such a description doesn't fit most of the smolnet. Which also surprised me. I do count myself as probably among the younger half of the smolnet's demographic, and even if people seem to have fairly firm beliefs around here they tend to keep their heads on straight. And otherwise it's easy to dismiss or ignore arguments and rhetoric I don't care to put two cents into.
The Soviet proved to be a very interesting group of people, and one that I'm technically still a part of - if for the only reason being that I haven't been automatically removed yet due to inactivity, as you're obviously reading this off my posts at CTRL-C.club. That being said, my time at Soviet when I was active was definitely formative in terms of my experience on smolnet and pubnixes, having never used either before.
So I did not come here as part of a community, but I did find that I like the community that is here.
I stumbled upon it, but did not esteem it as dross and move on. Something clicked in my brain and said "Hey, this probably makes more sense logistically and socially than a website full of billions of people and millions more lines of code."
I tend not to wake up and despise the capitalist world I live in as an American. It's not good, but it's honestly not terrible. For -me-. I recognize that such isn't the case for a lot of people.
I mean, heck, two years ago I was on the verge of financial oblivion and was courting having to either move into somebody's basement or get real comfy living out of my car with my wife and two cats. I figured it out, got things sorted; and now, regardless of how much work it takes to maintain, it is something I _can_ maintain. I esteem that effort as worthy because it keeps me engaged in existing. My true Hobbit impulse would be to get a small spit of land somewhere, and never have a job again; but in order for me to realize that dream I **must** work to get things in order first.
I also recognize the very competitive and combative stance that capitalism tends to espouse on an individual and systemic level. In other words, it's a fight, a competition, to survive and thrive in such an environment. Your profit and success comes at a cost to somebody or many somebodies else; just as their is a cost to you. And I seem to resonate with that more than everybody getting their own fair piece through some egalitarian means. No matter how much I desire to just let everybody have their own needs met and move on, I don't think it would work. We've got about a century's worth, a couple dozen regimes worth, of governments of every size trying to eschew or avoid capitalism at any and every cost, and yet they all seem to either fail or develop massive issues that lead to even more suffering than the "win or lose" scenario capitalism tends to present you with every day.
So I wasn't drawn here as a way to "stick it to the man" or find common ground with people. I think I share common ground in my lamentations about technology with most of the smolnet; but then again our body politic might be so different you find a growing need to slap me with a sock full of butter as you read this. Good on you, I guess.
I mean, fair and simple.
If people look at the smolnet or anything other than the CenterNet (which I'll coin, cuz I guess some call Gemini, Gopher et. al the Outernet) as something odd, strange, or too fringe to even consider... I find that viewpoint pretty close minded and indicative that the people in question don't really understand how their world works.
I hold this "Dismissal without due consideration == a lack of education" mentality about most things, though. You can't dismiss the Smolnet as weird if you don't even understand why or how it exists, without merely marking yourself as somebody who views any deviation from the norm of a highly centralized and profit-driven online network as undesirable, if not impossible. Just the same as you can't dismiss a given sect of a religion, or a certain stance on tabs versus spaces (where spaces will always win ;D ), without being able to explain and understand WHY you choose what you choose.
I hold that you can take good ideas from just about anywhere and integrate them into your workflows, your world view, and your own soul. It's more telling to me that many people, despite nigh-endless amounts of educational content and information about anything, choose to avoid learning more; than it is that we people floating somewhere beyond the moorings of digital reailty seem to be viewed as weird.
I've really come to enjoy this community. I don't agree with some of it, and I love that. It means I have plenty of foils against my own character to reflect and review different ideas and different things. This state of affairs is much healthier than the kind of echo chambers you can create in proprietary social media, or even on FOSS distributed media like Mastodon. There's something about making posts, and then replies to posts, and replies to those replies ad nauseum, that grants more thought and effort and care to the result than an easy 500 character rant on a mobile phone. And I did many of those in my time on Fosstodon.
You've made a weird wonderful world, Solder and company. I hope people continue to use it for what it is and contribute back stuff that comes from the soul. Even if it's sad, even if it's hard to understand. I'd take reality in all its evils and misfortune over an idealized dreamland meant to draw clicks and get money. Because I can change reality bit by bit, alone or with friends like all of you.
Email: wholesomedonut(at)ctrl-c(d0t)club .
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