Linux administration, Rust & Flutter programming (Bots, Web services, GUI programs, etc.), and general IT work @ $5/hour

No frickin doubt.

I hope not, and I’ll do my best to keep scammers away. The good thing about doing it on the clear-net and on Lemmy, is scammers are a lot more likely to leave traces of themselves that can be traced back to them, so if they’re smart, they’ll leave the sacmming stuff in the TOR network.

Anyways, that aside, I created this community as the post said, because of the restrictions that centralized services like UpWork, Fiverr, PayPal, LinkedIn, etc. impose on their users.

As an example, I have a few online friends who are artists and take commissions. All of them, without exception, have experiences with getting banned or limited because of taking commissions that included heavier/darker themes (suicide, self-harm, drug use, gore [scenes from a war for example], severe depression, etc.). They not only have gotten their accounts banned, but the funnier thing is, their account has been banned with all of their credits/money inside of it, that they had rightfully earned from their customers. Thousands of dollars of rightfully earned money, lost in an instant, just like that…
That is beyond scary and awful to me… It shouldn’t be acceptable at this point, and yet it is, because of the inhumane TOS that these services make you agree with before you get the chance to use them.

That is one of the very important reasons behind why I created this community. Freedom from the greasy hands of such corporations. If you know anything about GNU and FSF, to me, it’s no different than being dependent on proprietary software with very, very limiting and inhumane TOS. Users should be in control, not multimillion dollar corporations.

The second reason, is the restrictions that these services have for the kind of users that they accept into their platform in the first place.

PayPal and LinkedIn for example, require identification before you can sign up for their services, and in the sign up process, they instantly refuse to let you proceed any further, if they find out that you’re from certain countries that they don’t provide their services to. For example, if you live in countries that are included in the list of countries that are sanctioned by the US by the US trade laws.

Needless to say, if you somehow manage to sign up for their services, you will always run the risk of them finding out and seizing all of your income that you depend on for your life, and that’s IF they decide to stop there and don’t follow you further.

Because of these geographical restrictions, so many creative artists, so many smart developers, and so many hard working people that can all benefit the world in a better way, are forced to do something else that they have no passion for, settling for a job that sucks the soul out of them and stifles their creativity, until nothing is left. It’s tragic and inhumane to let this happen to so many bright people around the world who can offer their seevices to society and make it better. It’s an accepted level of racism apparently by many people, to not let the people who happen to be born in these countries by fate, reach their dreams, and instead to stifle their creativity and turn down their solutions, simply because they are from a different part of the world than what is acceptable.

I know that the crypto currency world doesn’t carry a good name, but as it is, it is the only way to solve these problems. As far as I know, it’s the only way to trade services in a decentralized way, that doesn’t give all of this power to these centralized, multi-million dollar corporations that only have money in mind, and not their users.