Fediverse-adjacent interview I just read that some of you might find interesting. Among other things, it gets into how we can elevate decentralized social networks out of the niches that they usually stay in. It’s a difficult problem.
As someone that is not a native English speaker which meaning of the word public is meant here?
Public as in public institution, polity founded and run?
Public as in publicly accessable, that is any joe rando can access?
or something else?
It’s referring to public as in the state is involved.
Another article making the same point.
Language is fuzzy, and “public” can mean the state is involved, but the other option is “in the public interest”, of which the state is one way to accomplish that. Sometimes open source projects, nonprofits, co-operatives, decentralized hosting infrastructure, etc can all provide governance mechanisms to that end. Looking at the top article, I see snippets of all the above mentioned.
I do like the idea of libraries playing a bigger role in such systems.