CapriciousDay

joined 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago

There's all sorts of other crazy options to consider like simply "stretching" this term out for a while. Any emergency will do.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah there's not really any plausible deniability there at all.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Two nazi salutes, one after the other

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Yeah I think it's less to do with intrinsic talent than motivation and sense of reward from engaging with technical problems.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

In every other aspect of society, choice is heralded as a good thing, a fundamental aspect of freedom even. We were supposed to believe that having a range of different brands of toothpaste is fundamentally a good thing, and people happily choose which ones they want. We vote, it's freedom.

Fundamentally federation is freedom as compared to centralised networks that lock you in. You can choose where to go and you never get locked in because you can choose to move instances later on - in particular Mastodon lets you take your followers with you.

If people can't spend 15 minutes making a decision on something they're going to spend probably hundreds of hours a year on, what does that say?

People figured out email, and that's essentially the same set of choices - you get an email provider, you don't go to "centralemail.com" where you can only communicate with people on that same locked in-platform.

The whole thing about people "not wanting to pick an instance" is just a bad meme. It's all about marketing and the fact Bluesky and its predecessors like Twitter and Facebook had the money to chuck around to attract people to the platform by e.g. paying off influencers to join.

It's also the case that BS aspires to be a federated platform (see: ATProto) - apparently it wants exactly the same "problems" that Mastodon has!

But, you know, will inevitably do something shitty with respect to that because VC funding.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Trump's gaggle of tech bros loves this opinion

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Listen I just don't have sympathy for it at this point. If people insist on maintaining iPad-only tech literacy then they can catch up with any average intelligence 4 year old.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

Kind of like how I'd be pessimistic about sticking my fingers in the closing boot of a cybertruck yeah.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

I think it's more going to be more like twitter than they're bargaining for.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

I mean I get it. And network effects are a thing. But these VC backed/owned firms (like bluesky) are cancer. Fascism promoting, lying, grifting, you name it. Can we please just try a little harder to support the community efforts?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago (8 children)

If you Google "sign up for mastodon" the first result you get is a sign-up page for mastodon.social which is the default instance. The sign up page is straight forward. I get we're all coddled by iPads or whatever but this argument evades me.

 

Or maybe a catchier name would be a "basic human decency GPL extension"

I can't help but notice that organisations constantly co-opt free software which was developed with the intent to promote freedom, use it to spread hate and ideas which will ultimately infringe on freedom for many.

The fact that hateful people who use such software may then go on to use it to promote or otherwise support fascism which prevents others from enjoying the software in the way it was imagined, is one potential manifestation of the paradox of tolerance in this respect. I think this is particularly true for e.g. social media platforms and the fediverse.

My proposal to combat this would be the introduction of a "paradox of tolerance" license which says that organisations which use the software must enforce a bare-minimum set of rules to combat intolerance. So anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, etc. The idea is then to make overtly hateful organisations legally liable for the use of the software through the incompatibility of the requirements with their hateful belief system.

This could be an extension to GPL and AGPL where the license must be replicated in modified versions of the software, thereby creating virality with these rules.

Is this a thing already? I understand OS and FOSS have historically had a thing for political neutrality but are we not starting to find the faults with this now?

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