Points were already made on AI, social media giants and unionizing - which I all agree on. It was also said before that it feels like the internet has changed and "isn't ours anymore". But I think we have to look deeper at ourselves and our communities and recognize that we have been naive and been played all along.

Big tech, a big supporter of these movements in the past, was never on our side. It was just convenient to them and because a lot of us and our friends are employed and we'll paid by them, we have the urge to defend them as friends. But they never were. Now it shows clear as day: they are fighting amongst each other but not on our side (and I'd argue they never have but that isn't the point).

And we must recognize that this reflexive 'shutting down of political discussion' isn't just stupid it also means that we have very little actual discussion about the politics of our doing and our world ourselves. Little experience in organizing, discussing and finding useful, practical compromise because we could just sit on our maximalist position from the comfort of our gaming chair at the high end laptop. Not having to deal with the messiness that is the real world, with real problems that real discussion, agreements and compromise.

We have to recognize that a big part of why the internet, and with it the world, is in such a bad place is also because we were fighting for social media companies to not be legally responsible for what is poster on their sites. That was won with our help. And it has lead to the free rain and massive power google, Facebook, etc have today. I am not saying we could have seen this (though I believe earnings were raised at the time), nor that these companies are not at fault. But we have our share of responsibility here.

Same for 4chan, 8chan and so forth. If we want to be on the defending line of free speech, but then this leads to fascist government take over citing QAnon, then we are loosing the very same free speech we were defending.

And we lose support from those who notice the problem but don't see us providing any answers that fix those for them. They just turn away from the crazy people. Maximalism just isn't any realizable position and we need to start organizing around actually achievable campaigns that recognize the real problems (we helped cause!) and propose actual solutions that are debatable.

Some examples have already been shared here: like point back at Big Tech and AI - though considering their marketing budgets I don't think we have much of a chance of being heard there - also with what has been going on at Wikipedia US, not sure they are an ally that stands with us there. Another strategy could be to make sure that exceptions are carved out, for self-hosting and decentralized community run services like the Ferdieverse or non-profits like Signal for e.g. . The EU in the past has been very willing to put these exceptions in for smaller shops on moderations and other policies, so there is a good chance we can get those in there, too.

We have to learn from our mistakes and that starts with recognizing our own culpability in the problems. And that the solutions will be messy and not philosophically pleasing maximalist positions.

We don't have to just right again. We have to fight smarter.