Ah, gotcha, so when my neighbor’s house needs to be redone because he rewired it himself, I’m on the hook for that.

I already mentioned that a community could collectively decide to continue to enforce building codes.

Too bad I have to stand by and let a couple of transient drug addicts cook meth in the house next door again

There would be much less incentive to create drugs for profit in a world without money.

Not saying there wouldn’t be drugs or addicts, but it’s extremely likely the scale of the problem would be fairly drastically reduced, as many people turn to becoming drug addicts due to becoming homeless as a way to find some way to cope with the extreme stress and trauma of the situation. Without money, there would be no reason for China to continue to sell fentenyl and other drugs to the cartels to be shipped into the US, and the same for Cocaine from South America. That would leave only what could be reasonably produced at home, which would likely take the form of weed.

If, on the chance that someone did start producing meth in a community that has collectively agreed to not allow for that, they could potentially be ejected from the community.

Sure thing. That’s totally going to happen. … it fall apart into vague handwaving about how everyone will be all helpful sunshine and smiles, which we know for a fact, people aren’t that at any level of their being.

It seems that you believe people are only motivated by money, status, or power. But we have examples of societies that were able to implement an Anarchist way of existence, such as Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, which abolished money, the state, and was able to thrive as federated communities. George Orwell went there, and spoke of how excellent that mode of society was, to the point that he fought in the war and took a bullet in the neck for it.

Except it wouldn’t be their home. Someone else built it

They could have built it themselves, too.

So the community bears the effort and cost of maintaining houses (or apartments) which they are not allowed to benefit from.

Bear in mind that the community would render aid to anyone who needs assistance in maintaining their own properties as well. It would be mutual aid. For the ‘cost’ of perhaps choosing to maintain a temporarily empty property, you would never need to ‘purchase’ a new roof, heater, or repairs for your own home. The community would help you the same way you helped them.

You’re also ignoring my mention of the benefit that this mutual aid would enable others to travel to maintained community housing anywhere in the world for free.

I think we would see a significant number of people jumping from home to home, trashing each one and then moving on to the next, leaving the community with the choice of cleaning up those homes, or letting them become uninhabitable hazards, and a blight on the neighborhood.

I think you’re putting a bit too much weight into the idea that the only thing keeping most housing stock in good condition is that financial barrier. I think most people would want to keep their home in good condition without financial pressures forcing them to keep it nice. If everyone let their home go into disrepair, then there would be no ‘good’ homes to jump to. It’s in the interests of everyone to maintain good housing stock, so that if you ever did move you wouldn’t only have shitholes to choose from.

If you think people would suddenly start taking care of a home just because they have one, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you, just look at all the litter and pollution people dump everywhere. Take a moment and look at cars in parking lots, and I bet you’ll find at least one that is packed to the brim with garbage, to the point of being dangerous to drive.

I’m not saying in this new way of society that everything will just become magically perfect, but I very much doubt it would be an epidemic on the scale you’re thinking of. Even in your example of garbage filled cars, you don’t find half the parking lot like that, only one at most. Just because a handful of people might not take care of their home doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it to stop millions of people worldwide from suffering and dying on the streets, throwing themselves under busses due to hopelessness.

No, there is a financial risk and financial incentive when you own a home, or even rent an apartment. If you don’t take care of it, then you lose out on that risk.

There are millions of dilapidated homes that are owned by the people who live in them. There are thousands upon thousands of rental properties that landlords will let become unlivable and condemned. Owning a property or even having consequences does not stop that from happening.

there are zoning laws, city, state, and national laws that pertain to maintaining a home, along with certifications and inspections to make sure the dwelling is safe to inhabit.

There is nothing stopping a community from continuing to enforce those laws if they desire.

but it’s also clear that “just make housing a right and let anyone move into a house that the community has to pay for and work to maintain” is an idealistic dream that naively handwaves away reality.

“It’s easier to imagine an end to the world, than to the end of capitalism.”

I’d suggest looking at some more in-depth analysis instead of dismissing the concept off hand from a short comment.

Maybe it the family in it moved out because they only needed a quick place to stay short term after moving to a new city? Could be that it’s housing for a college student who has gone back home during summer break?

I think in most cases, short-term housing as you describe would be best served by more dense apartment complexes that are maintained by the community, and the people who stay in them for those short periods. They would be maintained in the same way that public transport or libraries would be maintained, as a public resource that everyone has access to and needs.

The benefit to those who maintain such complexes is that they would also freely have access to use such facilities in other parts of the country. This is not terribly dissimilar to how individual Native Americans were able to travel vast distances in America and expect accommodation from virtually any tribe they came across (that weren’t hostile due to a larger conflict), because without such universal accommodation, each tribe would be limited in how far they could travel or trade. It was to all tribes mutual benefit to give each other that accommodation, in an early form of mutual aid (you can read more about that in David Wengrow’s book, The Dawn of Everything, a very interesting read).

Maybe a nicer house opened up in the area, so the resident left their old house to go to the new one?

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le’Guin offers an interesting solution to that scenario. In that book, money does not exist, and housing is simply a right that all are entitled to. Couples and families are given larger accommodation when it becomes available, which is managed by an elected housing committee.

A single family home would be unlikely to be empty for long in a desirable area, so I don’t think abandoned homes would be a significantly bigger issue than they already are under our current system. As a current example, In Japan, many smaller rural towns with dwindling populations have such an abundance of unoccupied homes, that they’re actively paying people to move out to the area, and will sell the house for under $10k in the hopes someone will take them up and maintain it.

It would fall on the neighbors to maintain the house until someone else moved in to it.

Only if they wanted to. There would be no one to force them to do such a thing. They may elect to do so since they would have much more free time in a socialist world (estimates usually suggest around 3 months of community work would be required to give everyone a good standard of living, with the remainder of of the year being free time to do with as they please).

How do you think they are going to feel when some “house jumper” moves in who just lets the place fall apart and moves on to another location because it costs them nothing to let the house go to ruins and they have no personal interest in maintaining it?

How is that prevented in our current society? Many home owners let their home go into disrepair despite owning it. Sometimes this is done out of poverty, or a lack of motivation for upkeep. The only way to force someone to maintain their home in our current society is with HOA’s who give fines or even jailtime to individuals if they don’t. They don’t have the most popular reputations.

Regardless, a community could decide to implement HOA-like rules if they all agreed to it, and then someone could decide if they wanted to live there and abide by those rules, or go somewhere where there aren’t any (like our current system).

I don’t mean regarding maintenance, I mean why are the houses empty?

I could see a very undesirable area having houses left abandoned, just as they are in our current system. But in areas that are desirable, why would a house be left abandoned for so long when everybody needs a place to live?

A group from in the community could keep track of what houses aren’t being used so they could direct people needing a home toward them. Perhaps if someone is moving they could inform that group that the house in now available, and give them the keys.

Could you elaborate what you mean?

In a theoretical socialist society, people would not be allowed to own multiple single family homes, only the one they’re currently using, since renting an essential need creates a power imbalance.

As a stop-gap, all currently rented single family homes (as in renting the entire house, not just a room in a house), could be converted to rent-to-own contracts, so that at some point that power imbalance ends and the renter is no longer being exploited.

Whether or not a small business owner is for or against raising wages depends entirely on their own ethical compass, and whether that compass is strong enough to turn away from the temptation of extra profit. It’s rare that individuals are so altruistic to be able to fully turn off the impulse for profit incentive and personal enrichment.

In contrast, a worker owned coop would not have that issue, as all workers would have equal incentive to raise wages as much as is reasonable while still maintaining the ability for the coop to thrive. Their individual ethics or moral compass wouldn’t factor in nearly as much.

If you’re using that currently, do you notice that on a fresh reboot, if you sit at the desktop and just wiggle the mouse for a while, or keep creating selection boxes with your mouse, KDE will freeze for a random amount of time?

Mobian is Debian designed for phones. PostmarketOS is another project doing the same thing, but with an alpine Linux base.

We have a community for this project as well: !open_source_ecology@slrpnk.net

Geany is a great, lightweight FOSS editor that totally respects your privacy, and supports all if the languages you mentioned, plus many more.

Enshittification will come to all proprietary apps sooner or later.

We rapidly need to switch to Linux Mobile. PostmarketOS and Mobian are the two most promising projects, and I would highly recommend anyone reading this to donate to them if you have the means.

Both projects directly use your donations to hire developers to build and polish the critical essentials to get this alternative viable as a daily driver.

Freetube app for desktop.

I think this post would be better suited for !climate@slrpnk.net than here, as it doesn’t really have any direct relation to solarpunk.

I would suggest that it is as complex as you wish to know.

My explanation above is not truly required to effectively use a federated platform, in the same way that most email users don’t actually know how precisely email works, and would find an in-depth explanation of it very complex.

All someone needs to know about email is that they must login to their email host provider, and that every user they might send email to has a unique name, and possibly a different host name after the @ symbol.

In the same way, the only thing someone needs to know about this platform, is they must login to the same place they signed up to (their host provider). They can then use it in a similar way to reddit. They might wonder why usernames or communities have different names after the @, but it doesn’t actually impede using the platform to not understand.

If anything, that might make it easier to use than email.

Lemmy is a software that people can host on their computer, and many people doing that form what is essentially a bunch of mini-reddits that can talk to each other to create one big platform.

Piefed is trying to fulfill the same goals as Lemmy, and is even fully compatible with Lemmy, so someone hosting a piefed server on their computer can join in with all the Lemmy servers, and to the Lemmy people, it appears to them like any other Lemmy server.

But underneath everything, the code base is entirely different. The commonality they share, along with mastodon, is they all use ActivityPub, which is the standard that allows them to all communicate and be compatible with each other, just like there’s an email standard.

Kbin (now Mbin) is yet another Lemmy compatible software that you can host on your computer, but it also tried to implement features that make it more like mastodon (twitter-like), so it can act both like reddit, with threads and comments and communities around single subjects, or be like mastodon and work with hashtags and following individuals instead of communities, like a microblogging website.

They also use different interfaces, but it’s only visible to people who directly use that server; to others who access it from their home server, it’ll adopt the look of the software their home server is using.

So as an example, you are using Lemmy since your home server is Lemmy.ml. if you visit a community hosted on a piefed server from within your Lemmy, like !fullmoviesonyoutube@piefed.social, it’ll look like any other Lemmy community.

But if you directly go to that piefed server by going to https://piefed.social/c/fullmoviesonyoutube you’ll see it from the piefed interface, since you’re accessing that piefed server directly.

All of three of the different federated Reddit-like softwares are intercompatible, so they all make up one big network.

It likely wasn’t federated to lemmy.zip. Try subscribing to it and then reloading it a few times. Otherwise you can go to it directly from https://slrpnk.net/c/money to see what should be showing up once it’s federated.

Since Taler isn’t operating in the same way as the wild-west of crypto, and needs to secure the adoption of existing banking institutions, its rollout is going to be much slower.

It hasn’t been widely adopted yet, but the big change that occured is it only just recently released a stable 1.0 version that makes wider adoption possible, and passed some essential security audits, including for iOS.

In addition to recently being approved and available in Switzerland, it is also planned to be added to a Ko-fi-like payment/donation system thanks to a grant by the NLnet foundation, which will hopefully enable it to gain wider adoption by creators or youtubers, as an example. In the future, it could become a replacement for Zelle if more banks adopt it (I suspect credit unions would be more likely to give it a try, if they became aware of it by their membership, and it was requested a lot).

There’s a bit more discussion of it over at !money@slrpnk.net, if you’re interested.

It likely does have more representation and mind-share here on lemmy since it aligns with the ideals of many users here in particular, we’re going to be more tuned into alternatives like that compared to the wider population.

GNU Taler is an anonymous digital cash, but it’s not yet widely adopted, I think only a few banks in Switzerland are using it. Hopefully if continues to gain momentum.