shoutout to the person who reported this post with “Reason: Bot meme, you can’t even read it. whoever replies is a bot too” 😂
Hmm. Self-organizing projects whose workers work on them entirely based on their need to be done, and the results freely distributed to anyone who wants a copy?
Literal fascism, obviously.
Things like FOSS stuff makes you think people can organize and work together freely to achieve a common goal, and maybe anarchy could work. But then, you see a busy intersection when the traffic lights go out and you realize the general public are idiots and everything devolves into selfish chaos as you’re stuck a half mile back, as cars shoot through in no particular order and you inch closer to the madness terrified to make your left turn. I have zero trust in society without some form of rule and order.
Think about a roundabout though in comparison, no lights or specific order, and there is a learning curve, but overall they reduce traffic better then stoplights under many conditions.
I guess my point is sort of extrapolating that a structure/presentation also heavily influences how users perceive or use a product/idea
Decentralization doesn’t necessarily mean disorganization. You can create a Lemmy instance with no moderation and rely purely on the community itself to self moderate, much like someone can create an instance with rules, and if someone disagrees with the rules they can create their own. Both are part of a decentralized system, so no one is actually coerced into participating in any system by regulation, just social pressure.
I find it a bit ironic that cars and traffic lights are being used as a metaphor for why anarchy won’t work. Let’s put aside that the example is of poor collective planning to build urban environments. Go to Vietnam and see how people drive without traffic lights, it’s complete madness. But it works, and in some ways it works better than what we have because the accidents are fewer and less severe while also serving more diverse modes of traffic.
Anarchism isn’t zero organization. It’s organization for legitimate and accountable purposes.
That’s a pretty weak definition. “Legitimate” especially is a vacuous term, and every form of democracy ever proposed is (theoretically) “accountable”.
whose workers work on them entirely based on their need to be done
You mean there’s projects out there where it’s not a bunch of individual devs all working on their personal pet features and ignoring all else?
I think it is not. Certainly most projects aren’t solely personal utilities, but devs working for fun rather than profit will almost inevitably produce something skewed towards their own tastes and skills. See: the presentation of any FOSS graphical app vs a paid equivalent.
Lemmy’s biggest mistake was not calling federations “communes” or “syndicates”
Agile is the anarchism of software development: sounds nice on a high level but basically no theoretical foundation behind it and thus in practice everybody makes it whatever the fuck they want it to be.
There’s some theory and computer science behind parts. The value of peer review is evidence-backed. The idea that dev teams should self-organize is consistent with some varieties of management theory. Retros have been shown to have value, though the way they’re often done in Agile teams I’ve worked in has left much to be desired. Estimation with dimensionless points has zero evidential backing. The notion that the team should be able to set dates rather than having milestones imposed by management is, at best, woefully naive, since it presupposes a commitment by management that, in real life, few managers are willing to make. And in most cases where the shit has hit the fan, we later find that we needed more analysis, more planning and more design up front, rather than less. There are only certain application domains where you can get away with being as minimalist with those disciplines as Agile exponents claim you should be.
