Resources they themselves were producing ?
Not enough to sustain itself. This is what I meant in the beginning with "not able to afford its own army". They were clearly unable to produce enough total wealth to share and distribute among the people.
Working with each other, for each other, works.
Only if you are willing to accept medieval-age levels of economic output, and only for small scale populations who are completely isolated who have somewhat equal access to available resources.
but it has brought enough progress
No, it didn't. It's very easy to see progress in the short term if you are sacrificing the long-term. The "free school for everyone" was not really free, it was sustained by the Commune taking resources from outside, but sooner or later they would run out of Other People's Money.
Then maybe we shouldn’t try to have large-spanning entities.
Yes, agreed. This is one of the reasons that I don't like to see the Fediverse as a bunch of "platforms" and would prefer to have it working as a proper decentralized web.
Just like internet services.
Internet services only work because everyone speaks the same language/protocols, which is only achievable with a large centralized authority, or with a network where peers do no trust each other (blockchain-style).
defense is not the most basic role of society
Not the basic role, but it is one of the most basic ones.
point of view at odds with the whole concept of what the Commune is about
You are projecting. You wish that people could live in peace and harmony and that followed the "concept" of the Commune. I am just pointing out that - as noble and good their ideals were - the Commune catastrophically failed when it was put into practice and had to face the reality of the world.
If the economic science itself doesn’t account for what is the goal here.
It shows a lot of hubris to talk about "goals" for society at large. It can work for a small group of people with a shared view and unchallenged leadership (like a small corporation or a family clan), but try living like that in anything larger than a small village and you will quickly see that the system is not sustainable. The Commune of Paris is only one of many examples.
We are talking about economic systems. If the system is not able to keep even the most basic of roles of organized society (defense), it has failed.
practiced in the Commune de Paris
The one who couldn't even afford the upkeep of its armed forces?
If the people willing to put in the money and time were preferring to do it on their own for that same sum.
Different groups of people. My (few) customers pay to have peace of mind and have a service that works for them. The self-hosters were people who seemed enthusiastic about a "cafe sospeso" system, but indicated no interest in letting unknown people into their servers nor in contributing to strangers.
Two things:
Something something "Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for everything else that has been tried".
Most if not all revolutions in human history only occurred when the "power-adjacent" class sided with the ruled populace and actively fought the rulers. For us (the comfortable middle class) to shrug and "Not play the Game" is quite lame.
you are trying to compete as a restaurant with people wanting to organize a barbeque with their friends.
Yes and no. I don't want to compete with the community. I was just expecting the community to have bigger ambitions that having a barbeque with their friends, and consider organizing itself to bring down Kraft Foods.
We had this discussion before. People that want to treat this as a hobby can by all means go for it. But hobbyists alone will never be able to build and maintain something that can become a real alternative to all the shitty dominant economic systems out there.
community-funded
Community underfunded. What the community is giving out barely covers the cost of the hardware, much less the labor of the admins.
Last year I considered offering accounts via a Caffe Sospeso on Communick, but it quickly became clear that is was going to suffer from the tragedy of the commons. Everyone that was willing to bear the actual operating costs would prefer to run their own servers to serve themselves, and the ones that were asking for "community supported" accounts were overwhelming just interested in free-riding.
So if your comment hasn’t been sent out out to other instances, they don’t have it.
What's stopping malicious actors to create an account on the same instance as you and follow you (or your RSS feed) exclusively to pull your data?
Remember "information wants to be free"? That adage works both ways. If people want (or need) real privacy, they need to be equipped with tools that actually guarantee that their communication is only accessible to those intended to. The "ActivityPub" Fediverse is not it. They will be better off by using private Matrix (or XMPP rooms) with actual end-to-end encryption.
Rebased is just a fork of Pleroma. It is meant to work as a microblogging application and last I checked it didn't do anything too different from Mastodon.