As long as they dont shove it down our throats, and then expand and expand and expand the features that are in their paid tier, and make you feel lesser for choosing their local only unpaid mode, and dont make the unpaid mode inconvenient with dark patterns.

Its happened too much, I’ve asked my friends to hop through so many different platforms over the years and decades

It always starts with something thats reasonable, and every time thus far, it expands into something I hate.

Wow, somebody is hunting mechanical engineers - hopefully none doing significant work get duped.

I’d be curious if the malicious downloads are basic viruses, or are something specialized to exfiltrate cad drawings, or something even more complex to subtly alter designs and cause harm

I do agree that no system is static. But I do not agree that because all systems are dynamic, that all systems must veer to public ownership or are regressing.

I do not believe that all products, markets, niches, and so on are in the interest, nor supported by the entire public, but that some products, irregardless of the public interest can still be deeply important or wanted by a minority of people. Thus they should have a route to still be created, but the public not obligated to support it.

In an example, Potentially over time that once niche minority product becomes of such importance and dominance that the public begins to gain control and wishes to support and dedicate public resources to it.

This churning is what keeps the system dynamic, but it also does not conform to some ideal where all products and ideas must be started and filtered by the public interest and consensus.

I have not yet, but i do plan to, thanks for the reading list, I will check into it.

At least at the moment and from what I know so far, I do not identify or align with Marxism or Communism, I do with socialism and i do not view socialism as some half step.

I don’t think I’d be “stopping” the progression, just that the progression is not towards some absolute idealistic end. (and to note in my ideal system, my individual ideals are secondary to the populations average), just that the natural maximum optimization, say of organizations type, an amount of organizations would be publicly controlled by a government, and an amount would be controlled by the employees themselves in a coop structure.

I think this makes sense as there will likely be products that a niche set of people want, but is not at such a scale that the government and the people behind it would want to dedicate collective resources towards it directly.

Fundamentally I believe the uniqueness and fickleness of people I believe will always outpace any collective structure, and so allowing for that to be represented in a society is key to success, and that entails organizations outside of collective-control which rely on consensus.

I do want a socialist system were all shares of an organization are either public ally owned or owned by the employees themselves, with no rent seeking capitalists involved.

I call myself a socialist but do not support a full horizontalism or full decentralization. I support partials of both.

I do believe that optimizations for quality of life and value and stability are rarely at the ends of the spectrums, but sometimes somewhere in the middle and subjective to democratic agreement and changing based on reality.

I want my system to be flexible to have times of more centralization, times of decentralization, times of horizontality, times of independent nodes, etc.