The necessary socialist International

[Last edited on Monday, 6 October 2025]

Like Pëtr Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Emma Goldman and so many other anarchists, i think we need to take the means of production and the cultivated lands, in order to finally end it with this domination of exploitation, violence and death that patriarcapitalism is, and to save ourselves, our children and the future generations, because in addition to the usual exploitation and violence there’s the huge ecological problem, one of the most problematic elements of which is the average temperature of the world rising, while greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, mainly driven by energy production and consumption for which current “green technologies” are just greenwashing, and despite the many decades of peaceful pressures on governments and companies that we acted in every sauce from below, obtaining nothing at all; and climate change is only one of the six of nine planetary boundaries we are far beyond.

A “forced-by-nature-degrowth” would happen when it would be too late for our species and so many others to not extinguish and, at the same time, “degrowth-by-our-will” is impossible as well: it’s impossible that the people in the US, in Europe, in China, in Russia, in all these “developed” countries, and particularly the upper classes, who are by far the greatest GHG emitters, will “degrow” in numbers high enough and in times short enough to get our species out of the very sorrowful extinction by famine, thirst, warfare and pandemics that we are already living today in many territories. This is why i think there’s no alternative to taking the lands, to cultivate them without polluting, to take and close the industrial “meat factories”, to take the means of production and turn off all the polluting ones.

Agricolture today produces the second most important part of greenhouse gases, but it is possible to cultivate without resorting to fossil fuels burning, that today is mostly used to produce synthetic nitrogen, by practicing agroforestry and permaculture, that are more productive than industrial agricolture and don’t pollute, and we could also help ourselves with the most advanced fungal solutions, so it would be possible to start anew everywhere, on the model of Kurdish democratic confederalism and Murray Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, as a world of small communities, that in the cities would be municipalities, and in smaller towns the town itself, where decisions would be taken and current rules would be abrogated or redefined and refined in assemblies that would be open to all and where everyone would have the same decisional power, with the municipalities commercially relating with each other by public assemblies as well – because it should be clear by now, also due to the historical experiences of “real communisms,” with their marxist nonsense of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which produced some of the worst nefariousness in history, that social justice and good levels of social equality require to be backed by the constant possibility of open and public verbal confrontation about what to do with common goods and common spaces, and about which rules to give ourselves.

This kind of social organization has precedents in history, and today it would be easier to achieve, in a social context where love would finally be free from sexual paranoia such as misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, which originated from the superstitious approach to our somewhat innate competitiveness and the aggressiveness that stems from it, with free and global access for all to lay, egalitarian education and knowledge of horrors of the past, with the abolition of licenses and patents, and with the possibility for all to sublimate our competitiveness and lash out the aggressiveness that stems from it in the many harmless or mostly harmless ways that this can be done, for example through frugal sports, old and new arts, including immersive video games, and so on.

Yet time is crucial, and it’s running out not least with respect to the risk of extinction by ecological issues (climate change, loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification and so on), but especially with respect to the increasing probability that this umpteenth crisis of capitalism will end up again in an unfolded third world war, that would be an acceleration towards the extinction of our species and so many others, through the spread of worse and worse nationalisms and the already ongoing wars, that are still mainly driven by nationalist conflicting wills to hoard raw materials that we should hugely reduce our use of, such as fossil fuels and so many others.

This crisis of capitalism that we are living today is not only the umpteenth of a series of crises that have been increasingly damaging, but it’s also unprecedented, with its enormous ecological implications that are now, already tragic, with the amount of death and pain they have already caused and are causing now in the world, that would just get more and more tragic and painful for everyone with the worsening of the already and since long ongoing crisis in the ability of the living to reproduce even in order to feed us, and with the worsening of water scarcity and drought that is already ongoing, and with so many other problems that patriarcapitalism has caused and is causing and that would certainly form a whole which, as if one or a few of its parts wasn’t enough, would be fatal for our species and so many others – unless we actually organize and do the socialist International we need to do, quickly, to transform what otherwise would certainly be a bitter and painful end for most or all of us into the foundation and the beginning of a new and much more peaceful, just and happy world for all to live in. Because that which is holy and sacred is not much our individual lives, but life itself, that just can’t be stopped, and in order to be an healthy, and lasting, and maybe even everlasting part of it, and in order to most peacefully live our individual lives in it, we still have to understand that it is the only “god”, and we still have the most of an infinity to learn from it. :-)

Finally: although it would still require being armed, if we managed to be many enough to take the means of production and the cultivated lands in our rich countries and everywhere, maybe not even a single drop of blood, neither ours nor of our adversaries and enemies, would be shed.

Reasons why Meta joining the Fediverse is very bad, how to mitigate the damage, and an idea to save the Fediverse as a new and safer web space

[Last edited on Tuesday, 16 January 2024]

Although i’m sure it won’t avoid most of the damage, i strongly support the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact, and urge Fediverse admins to block Meta’s Threads (currently, the threads.net domain) at their Fediverse instances’ level, because Meta, the producer of Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and Threads, is known to do such things as:

  1. profiling users for targeting advertisements [e.g.: 1, 2];
  2. controlling their users emotions;
  3. spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories about November 2020 presidential election in USA;
  4. censoring political organizations – mostly, and by far, of the global left [1, 2], while not censoring political organizations of the most far right (e.g.: italian neofascist organizations like Casapound, Forza Nuova, Lealtà e Azione all have many pages and profiles on Facebook);
  5. facilitating a genocide;
  6. super-exploiting moderators;
  7. censoring wildfires news stories from Canada to Canadian users;
  8. systemically censoring Palestine contents on Instagram and Facebook;
  9. and so much more;

But most Fediverse platforms’ instances, especially most or all of the most populated, are not blocking and won’t block threads.net; thus, using those instances, will be less and less different than using Meta’s products, in terms of data scraping by Meta and users’ privacy, because those instances expose their users to the risk of giving complete access to their “private” messages (messages addressed to “Mentioned people only”, on Mastodon) just by unknowingly or thoughtlessly mentioning Threads accounts in such messages, and to complete access by Meta to their “less public” posts (posts addressed to “Followers only”, on Mastodon), when Threads users will get the possibility to follow other Fediverse platforms accounts, that is soon going to be implemented by Threads developers. Meta has scraped even “less public” posts and “private” messages on its platforms in the past, and it is most probably still doing it, in spite of some court cases that accounted it guilty of doing it and “punished” it, much later than when each one of those abuses was made, with financial penalties that were ludicrous to Meta, because of its huge financial wealth.

To mitigate these risks, users of Fediverse platforms instances that have not blocked the threads.net domain at instance level can still block it by themselves and for themselves only (on Mastodon’s official web frontend, this can be done by clicking on the three dots icon in the lower right corner of any post and choosing Block domain from the popup menu); or they can set their accounts to prompt for their confirmation whenever another account tries to follow theirs (on Mastodon’s official web frontend, this can be done by going to Preferences > Public profile > Privacy and reach tab, and unchecking the Automatically accept new followers checkbox), and then paying attention to not mention any Threads account in their non-public posts (“Followers only” and “Mentioned people only” posts, on Mastodon).

Still, to ensure that the Fediverse won’t become a big barrel from which Meta, and probably other big and medium commercial players in the future, will scrape not only data from public posts, but also from “less public” and “private” posts, the most safe way would be to write a new social networking protocol specification, that could be named FreeSocialProtocol, and to put it under a license or a patent that (1) would prohibit any use of the protocol itself in products that are not open source, and (2) would prohibit its use in products that also use other protocols that are under no licenses, or that are under licenses not prohibiting their use in non-open source products (point 2 would make it a viral license/patent, like the GPL, but only on the open source condition; and necessarily so, because otherwise, this license/patent very purpose would be defeated).

I have no illusion that a new protocol with such a license or patent would be used by many from the start, and maybe it would take long for it to gain traction, or maybe it would never exit the “niche” status, but it would be good all the same even in these cases, and i think there is the possibility that it would gain a lot of traction, soon or later. But, again, i think it would be just and good if it existed even if it was never to exit the “niche” status.

Note 1: i’m trying to verify whether it is possible to create such a license, or such a patent, and to apply it to the specification of a social networking protocol: on Friday, 22 December 2023, i wrote an e-mail to the FSF (using the licensing@fsf.org e-mail address) asking just this; and on Saturday, 6 January 2024, i’ve written to the European section of the FSF too, at its licence-questions@fsfe.org e-mail address, without receiving any answer from both as of today, Tuesday, 16 January 2024.

Note 2: on this topic, you may want to read these ongoing discussions i’m having: the first one with a Fediverse protocols and platform (Streams) developer, the second one with an Akkoma developer (Akkoma is another Fediverse platform, a fork of Pleroma). I think they’re both at least very useful, clarifying and instructive.

NetworkManager: come cambiare i DNS

Usare, per la propria connessione, DNS pubblici alternativi invece di quelli preimpostati dal proprio provider, magari per aggirare la censura di qualche sito (cosa che è possibile fare anche, e forse più semplicemente, usando Tor Browser), è facile con NetworkManager, il “gestore di rete” di gran lunga più usato su Linux.

Per prima cosa si tratta di cliccare con il tasto destro del mouse sull’iconcina di rete che sta nella “system tray” del desktop e, dal menu che compare, cliccare col tasto sinistro su “Modifica connessioni…”.

NetworkManager - Cambiare i DNS - 1

Dalla finestra “Connessioni di rete” che compare bisogna selezionare la connessione che si sta utilizzando, nel mio caso “Ethernet”, e poi cliccare sull’iconcina con l’ingranaggio.

NetworkManager - Cambiare i DNS - 2

Dalla nuova finestra che compare bisogna selezionare la scheda “Impostazioni IPv4”.

Se il “Metodo” è impostato su “Automatico (DHCP)”, bisogna cambiarlo in “Automatico (DHCP) solo indirizzi”. Se invece, come nel mio caso, è impostato su “Manuale”, va già bene così. Nella casella di testo “Server DNS” bisogna specificare i DNS che si vuole usare (se sono più di uno basta separarli con uno spazio, o con virgola e poi spazio), poi cliccare sul pulsante “Salva”.

NetworkManager - Cambiare i DNS - 3

Ora si può chiudere anche la finestra “Connessioni di rete”.

Poi, perché il cambiamento di DNS sia effettivo, bisogna (almeno sul mio sistema), disattivare la connessione in uso cliccando col tasto sinistro sull’iconcina di rete e poi su “Disconnetti”…

NetworkManager - Cambiare i DNS - 4

…per poi riattivarla cliccando di nuovo col tasto sinistro sull’iconcina di rete e poi sul nome della connessione.

NetworkManager - Cambiare i DNS - 5

Ecco fatto.