Man socialism keeps sounding better and better they will even take those pesky wife and kids off my hands/s.

But in serious most Americans don't know shit about socialism our capitalism they live under. Dumb fucks look at you with surprise when you mention our highway system would be considered socialist program.

American here and fuck capitalism.

Hey now, that's unfair!

As à Canadian, I can attest that we also blindly defend capitalism.

We are poor and our freedoms are exploited, but at least we're free!

Rise up! Seize the beans of production!

Look, they're just temporary inconvenienced billionaires.

What I learned from observation is that they tend to believe that, one day, they will be part of the "small minority". The American Dream!!!1

KRUSTY KRAB IS UNFAIR! MR. KRABS IS IN THERE! STANDING AT THE CONCESSION! PLOTTING HIS OPPRESSION!

Yeah I'm not sure why it's nowadays common to simplify socialism as "workers owning the means of production". It's not exactly wrong, but it is often misunderstood.

A company being owned by it's employees is not necessarily "socialism". In today's global capitalist economy, there are worker-cooperatives as well, but they too exist within the capitalist economy and have to follow its rules, which is above all the profit motive. If you don't orient yourself based on profit, you will be out-competed eventually.

Traditionally, when socialists talk about "workers owning/seizing the means of production", they are not talking about individual workers or individual businesses.

Workers means "the working class", which would be pretty much everyone ("the 99%"). Means of production means industry and the economy overall, not individual factories and businesses.

What makes FOSS special is that the software is not privately owned by anyone, not by the devs, not by a couple of programmers, not by a company. It is commonly owned, anyone can use, copy and alter the code however they want without any artificial barriers. This of course makes it a lot harder to extract money from users.

In publicly-traded corporations, long term wealth extraction isn’t the goal. Getting sales up next quarter is. Employee-owned cooperatives are more likely to think long term. Plus, I’d vastly prefer to trust the average worker to do the right thing in a coop situation vs a manager doing it in a situation where they’re legally required (as standard publicly-traded corporations are) to prioritize the financial gains of shareholders above all other interests. Maybe you’ve lost so much faith in people that you think no one would ever choose to be slightly less rich for any reason. But plenty of people know there’s such a thing as enough, that there are interests as important as next quarter’s profits. They just don’t usually get MBAs.

Ah, yes, we can see it with all the communities running their own Mastodon servers and extracting the maximum of wealth from their users. /s

You must think that humans are inherently greedy and/or are projecting what you would do in a scenario where you're part of a worker co-op. Most workplaces aren't worth millions. Most folks who round themselves in a worker co-op would most likely try to better the operation for everyone.

They do when they work in a cooperative and have a stake in the business being successful.

That would be an improvement actually, because the customers of these companies are not users, they are other companies looking to advertise or buy users personal data. The users of for profit social media are in fact the product, not the customers.

Workers don’t give a shit about customers because that’s how the incentive system is set up. Give workers the profits, you give them a good reason to give a shit about how clients feel.

I'm reminded by that guy on TikTok

"You just lost a customer"

"Good"