There's a focus on making games here for obvious reasons, and more generally social networking is the big thing (which is possibly justified). But what do you think alt-tech's biggest priority should be at this point?
A couple possibilities:
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A genuinely free-speech social network. Not "we'll cave to the big corps as soon as they threaten to delist us" but a network that doesn't count on being listed in the App Store, is willing to distribute its own ipas/apks, etc.
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An alt-tech search engine that doesn't just get its results from the big corp search engines and only indexes non-woke sites. For example, pulling results only from Infogalactic, and not Wikipedia.
Money. Payment option like paypal.
And then anime tiddies.
But yes, money.
Frankly I think in order for alt-tech to really secure its future we need to go full keiretsu mode and open an actual, honest-to-FDIC bank. It's the only way to force the payment clearing systems to not fuck with us. The credit card companies can be dicks, but the ECP/ACH systems have stricter rules about what can and can't be denied.
It's not like VISA or MasterCard where they can say they just won't do business with certain companies. When something goes into ACH, if it's a legitimate transaction and the money exists then they HAVE TO FUCKING PROCESS IT or they're fucking with the Dept of Commerce and the Federal Reserve.
Same group, different department.
It's like this:
Say I want to make a donation to Styxhexenhammer. If I use my credit card, Visa can say "it's our money, and we don't want our money going to Styx, so we're denying this transaction." Technically, they are allowed to do that.
If however I write a check to Styx, my bank cannot say "we don't like styx, so we're not going to clear this check". They're not allowed to refuse to clear a legitimate transaction authorized by me. Because legally, it's not their money. It's mine.
There are electronic mechanisms in place to do this stuff, people just use credit cards instead because they're easier.
But if we set up a paypal like system, but have it registered as an actual bank, then it has access to all those same transaction clearing systems and is insulated from any corporate bullshit.
You don't hear about any drama from the part of the Federal Reserve that does transaction clearing. Because it's an uncontroversial, bland, boring thing that just works.
Offhand I'm not sure about the rules of credit unions doing business across state lines, although there are solutions to that in corporation law.
To our credit, I suspect a credit union that markets directly to conservatives would be financially better off than your typical credit union.
I am part of a national level credit union.
The credit card systems should be replaced with an open interbank system.
There's no way to do this without building your own bank. It's literally impossible without billionaire backing.
Not impossible. Just tedious.
You would move from municipal credit union to state to national, then convert from national credit union into banking institute.
It would be hard to just start your own bank, with all the regulations. But start your own credit union is much more manageable. You'd only need multiple millionaire backing, not billionaire.
We need to focus on the basics first:
Not depending on commie, US-controlled ICANN for DNS.
Having more free speech oriented hardware providers.
Using nonconventional protocols, harder to scrape (hello Mozilla archivers!) and censor.
It's all pointless if they can just knock us out of our own platform (that we PAID for) by calling mommy government because we hurt their fee-fees.
Have to agree with the rest of the posters here. Money and infrastructure. Most software can wait. The most important thing is to have a network that isn't controlled by current governments capable of linking and interfacing without using things like domain names. Make it really easy to route around damage.
Next is money. For fairly obvious reasons. Mastercard is up there in terms of cooperations ranked on readiness to take over a large chunk of the world.
Fediverse already exists.
I personally want to see a "DeepFreeze" like place for companies and products that tracks them promoting SJW shit. Like Intel financing Feminist Frequency, all the companies that have diversity initiatives or do 'positive' discrimination, etc. Would make boycotting/avoiding them a lot easier.
For example, every time I want to try a new library (for software development) I have to look for their Code of Conduct (and whether it's based on Contributor Covenant), their company page for pandering, etc.
OAG's traitors of america list is a good start.
Existing in any form whatsoever.
the problems aren't strictly technological
With crypto breaking into the public consciousness we are starting to see an end run around the payment processor bottleneck. It will take time and initially, like all early technology, it will be clunkier, slower, and more expensive than current tech that has been refined for generations. But remember that the first cars also had significant disadvantages over horses.
DDoS protection that isn't progressive controlled.
Payment processing, if that is even possible given the state of banking.
There are federated social media sites like poa.st which work decently at combating censorship if you want a twitter alternative. If you want you can set up your own instance, but bigger ones can easily blacklist it. At the very least you won't be removed entirely, just quarantined with other undesirables.
adhoc wireless mesh networks
An alt-tech search engine is way less exhausting.
Social media consumes a huge amount of resources before you even get to the ideologues. You got the trolls, the shitposters, the stealth advertisers, etc. Then after those guys you get into the actual-child-porn posters, the shock-value-posters, the slow spiral of certain pathological ways of thinking taking it over, etc. Then - after all that - you fainlly get to the ideologues and paid political script poster types.
And that's also before you consider that honestly social media is a plague on humanity to begin with.
A payment processor. And anyone who says "but crypto" gets defenestrated - letting the Chinese grey market manage your ledger is not a solution.
Infrastructure, as everyone has said.
What infrastructure is needed for technology?
Money. Communication. Storage. Security.
With those four things, you can build off them to make nearly anything. But of those four, none are cemented. The primary DDoS protection services are corrupt. Webhosters and server farms are all about taking down non-woke content (just look at the start-up issues of the .win network). There's no "free" communication network with any buy-in. And even some credit unions are causing trouble for right-wing personalities, let alone just credit cards or payment middlemen.
Hardware is the main issue, since the software for what you propose exists. Having your own server that can hosts your own peertube instance is one thing, handing a load that google takes care of with a free youtube channel is something else. Plus, you'd be at the mercy of the banks still.
I'm not a primitivist, but I am a technology critic. The way tech currently exists really favors globalist bullshit. I think all the research done on scaling things up needs to be done to scale them down and make it all more local. County or town level even.
Payment processor, web hosting, and cloud infrastructure. Then you can build whatever you want