Serfs were at least tied to the land and somewhat entitled to live there. It's a lower status than serfs.

Not human beings.

Things.

A surprisingly large number of people chose to become serfs due to the benefits it provided. It seems wacky, but companies really are treating users in ways that lords were legally prevented from treating their surfs.

The privileges vs obligations of serfdom would be unpleasant by our standards, but it wasn’t slavery.

> I saw a sign last year for forestry service work happening locally to me. Apparently they're only going to provide safety announcements on Facebook.

There probably are (and should be) laws or regulations forbidding that, especially because "safety".

OTOH, from the PoV of the lower-level Forestry Service people who decided to do that - I'd guess they're stuck in a miserably understaffed and low-budget bit of a pretty dysfunctional government, and doing traditional safety announcements would cost them 100X the time and headaches of "just put it on Facebook".

You are most probably right, it's just the effect is the same unwanted de-facto monopoly on communications... so what's then there to do???

From "forestry service", I'll guess they're under state or federal authority, so "just be a squeaky wheel in local politics" is not an option.

Sadly, this is something that needs reliable, local news coverage. Doesn't much matter if that's a "for profit" newspaper magically transported from the Good Old Days of local journalism...or ongoing, ~thankless work in the trenches by a person or few with the skills to set up and run some flavor of local news web site (which could be very niche - say, forestry service stuff, parks & rec news, road closures & construction, etc.).

"Technofeudalism" is a term that already exists, actually. Here's Cory Doctorow reviewing Yanis Varoufakis's book about it: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/

> they're only going to provide safety announcements on Facebook.

While I understand, what's the alternative you propose? I have seen HN threads ridiculing some govt website for being outdated or not fixing the latest vulnerability or not using the latest version etc. Or if they do allocate a bigger chunk of their budget for tech and there will be unreasonable HN threads about how one user feels he/she could build it over a weekend and question the budgets. Worst yet, I have seen numerous HN threads talking about big ad tech (which most big tech are), claiming their services are totally non essential and a waste of time, and how their life improved since they stopped using these services. This comment goes as far as to call all the users as serfs totally ignoring that many real people and their real use cases :(

I feel its used because it's free and it simply works for most people. I feel the status quo is there because of the lack of a better one. You simply cannot make everyone happy on HN, let alone all people.

"While I understand, what's the alternative you propose?"

Simple: Strike the word "only". It's not that hard to post to several sites and also your own. I'd like some RSS on the main site too. It's not that hard for an individual and it's even easier for an organization with thousands of employees.

Yep that's it exactly.

I'd prefer the government to host its own data.

I'd also like any site hosting public information to be compelled to serve that information to everyone.

Facebook may not know they're being used like this, and it would be fine for them to object, but if they do want to carry government alerts they should be open to non-users without tracking or shadow profiling.

Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere.

(https://indieweb.org/POSSE)

> I have seen HN threads ridiculing some govt website for being outdated or not fixing the latest vulnerability or not using the latest version etc. Or if they do allocate a bigger chunk of their budget for tech and there will be unreasonable HN threads about how one user feels he/she could build it over a weekend and question the budgets.

So? Public institutions are free to run "outdated" web sites and ignore random people ridiculing them on HN. "We're on a budget, stop whining" is a perfectly valid response, if a such behavior even warrants a response.

>Public institutions are free to run "outdated" web sites and ignore random people ridiculing them on HN.

And people are free to ignore them and rely on trillion dollar corporations.

I understand your point, but the main point here isn't internet elitism. It's how you justify hosting servers for stuff no one is already visiting. "Not relying on Meta" is an equally HN take.

> organisations can't exclusively rely on closed systems like Facebook/Meta to run their services.

these organizations can barely update those sites sometimes. what hopes are there in maintaining and posting on their own blog?