I get very exhausted when people use their knowledge about how things are done in the big tech / surveillance capitalism (or maybe just "capitalist") world, and try and apply it in totally different domains, like community-focused volunteer projects.
Almost all the implicit assumptions don't hold.
Capitalist projects have a lot of resources to solve problems because they are willing to engage in destructive and extractive behaviours.
If we remove that part, the equation massively changes.
in capitalist tech: massive user growth ---> lots of money (funding) available --> pay fancy people to do fancy scaling things
in community project: massive user growth ---> aaaah everything is really chaotic now, there are loads of tasks that nobody wants to (or can) do... it's like actual work!! I thought this was meant to be fun...
the solution to me is to scale out, not up, federate don't grow. but still, people seem more focused on big ideas that need to scale up to be successful.
I think this is a great point and a Fab question -
How community tech can be done in ways that out-do, or do out - capitalist tech.
Might be interesting to experiment as a conference kind of a thing..
To let solutions trickle out..
Could be done all online..
