Tl;Dr: If the problem is centralized governance, why isn’t de-centralized ‘federated’ options the answer – like Lemmy?
One wing of the Trump coalition is working towards Dark Enlightenment, and wants to create Networked States: de-centralized micro-nations that allow authoritarian rule and ‘easy Exit’. Who ever ‘owns’ the Networked State sets the rules, anybody who joins can leave if they don’t like how it’s run. A key tennant of this vision is freedom: I’m free to make the laws I want (as an owner), and you’re free to leave (and go make your own laws in your own Networked State) as a citizen.
There are some really intriguing possibilities here, so it’d be interesting to find some examples of how this has worked out in the real world so we could predict; does this really lead to good ends?
The universe of Social Networks is a really interesting analogy.
Think of it this way: Social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr) are hugely popular but many users are dissatisfied because of the arbitrary rules of a specific site: everybody hates the Facebook ‘Algorithm’, or more concretely – Tumblr famously went down in flames after it banned porn. Similar things have happened to Reddit.
An alternative to huge, centralized social networks are the ‘Fediverse’ networks like Mastodon and Lemmy (and WordPress, that I’m writing this on). And… Almost all of the suck. Not because of the features (although this contributes), but because the users tend to be assholes (looking at you Lemmy).
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