We will build a socio-political infrastructure to intervene in every area of Black life: food and housing cooperatives, Black Liberation schools, people’s banks and community mutual aid funds, medical clinics and hospitals, rodent control and pest extermination programs, cooperative factories, community cultural and entertainment centers, the establishment of an intercommunal electronic communications network, land and building reclamation projects, public works brigades to rebuild the cities, youth projects, drug clinics and many other such programs.
— Anarchism and the Black Revolution by Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin (65%)
Emphasis mine. I probably spend way too much time on the Fediverse. And people on the Fediverse tend to talk about the Fediverse, a lot. In the grand scheme of "things that need to be expropriated and decentralized", I often feel like the other stuff in Ervin's list here are not being prioritized highly enough, in comparison.
However, the fact that he mentions electronic communications in this book at all (first published in 1979) reminds me that it is actually important to do. When I feel like the Fediverse discourse is getting way into its own head, I should remember that the big mainstream platforms are all trying to orchestrate right-wing coups and shit. Building a good replacement probably does take the exact kind of dedicated people I see in my timeline, and we're seriously not even close to finished yet. I bet Ervin might like the idea of Oliphant's "Archipelago" thingy, if he doesn't know about it already.
Of course, the original sentiment coming from 1979, this probably presages mesh networks and municipal broadband more than it does federated social media. How cool would it be to access one over the other though??