Digg:
It had potential, but after becoming an ai news aggregator now there’s none.
Lemmy:
Low engagement / kinda dead. Also, I have heard that the growth is slowing down(somebody pls provide a citation for this).
Besides that, it’s pretty much reddit, for better or for worse.
9gag:
I just made a post there, my first impressions are not good. Got insulted and my post got removed. Now, that might have something to do with me not understanding how the website works, but only time will tell. I will spend more time there to see if it’s worth anything.
You say the need motive does not have an endless feedback loop, but I think you are really ignoring how need scales with technological advancement. When socialism develops new medical treatments and/or better housing those immediately become new basic rights. The standard of living constantly rises which requires constant material input. Advancing society expands the definition of what people need to live a dignified life.
Even if we accept that the need motive lacks the artificial acceleration of the profit motive, you still have to face the baseline. Providing a modern, dignified standard of living for 8 billion people with housing, healthcare, and green energy already requires an ecological footprint that exceeds the Earth’s capacity.
We do not need an endless feedback loop to hit ecological collapse. The starting line is already unsustainable. Stopping the profit loop just means we crash into the wall at a steady speed instead of accelerating. To actually live within planetary boundaries, we have to intentionally shrink the material baseline of our consumption. That is degrowth. You cannot simply assume that meeting human needs will automatically align with the Earth’s carrying capacity, because right now, they do not.
I’m aware that advancements also elevate living standards. However, your conception of this necessitating destruction of the environment is incorrect, and this is not at all the same as capitalism’s incessant drive towards accumulation. Degrowth as a focus is the wrong approach, advanced technology like developed rail systems actually save the environment more than car-centric infrastructure. We have to advance further to protect the environment, and combine that with climate-focuses approaches, not slow our advancement and stick with small-scale production, which is less environmentally efficient.
Degrowth is a trap. Environmentalist socialism is necessary, and is the actual way to protect and preserve the environment. Socialism will end fast fashion, incessant trinket production, and more that currently only serve to accelerate capital accumulation, while advancing technology that is more environmentally efficient.
It’s really as simple as this.
It is not as simple as you make it sound, because you are treating advanced technology like it exists in a vacuum instead of recognizing the physical cost of building it.
You call degrowth a trap, but ignoring physical limits is the real trap. Degrowth doesn’t mean abandoning rail for inefficient small-scale production. It means intentionally shrinking the total material throughput of the economy. We can advance rail while drastically degrowing destructive sectors like aviation, the military, and industrial meat.
The problem is that building your advanced green infrastructure still requires massive mining for copper, concrete, and rare earth metals. Those mines destroy real ecosystems whether a socialist planner orders them or a capitalist does. Efficiency per person does not change the absolute physical footprint of extracting resources for 8 billion people. If your environmentalist socialism refuses to shrink our total material consumption, it will just plan its way into the same ecological collapse.
I think if it must be put simply, your communism is just vastly more optimistic than mine.