Comment by AlienRobot

Comment by AlienRobot a day ago

>We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins

No. Not really, no. We have like 20 open source platforms already. Nobody uses most of them. The ones that people do use are extremely boring compared to any closed platform because they were created for the worst possible use of social media: letting people post their opinions online. For the average user they often lack highly requested features like making profiles private because the open source platforms decided to be decentralized as well adding enormous complexity to them. That also comes with privacy issues like making all your likes public.

People could just use Tumblr if they wanted. Text posts of any length, add as many images as you want anywhere in the post you want, share music, videos, reblog other's posts. But people don't go to Tumblr.

You could create the perfect platform but people still wouldn't use it because they are too addicted to drama, arguing online, and doomscrolling to calmly scroll through a curated catalog of music that someone spend 3 years publishing on their blog.

immibis 12 hours ago

This comment was down voted but it's right. We don't need more open source platforms - we need more successful open (source code doesn't matter) platforms.

Actual businesspeople are pretty ruthless in getting people to using their product. Open source people aren't, by nature (except for Lennart Poettering).

Also open source people tend to make software instead of services. Mastodon isn't a Twitter clone - it's software you can install on a server to make your own Twitter clone. Mastodon is software and Twitter is a service. mastodon.social is a Twitter clone. The only exceptions to this are highly P2P softwares like Bitcoin, where the software and the service merge into one.

Reply View 1 reply

AlienRobot 2 hours ago

>Actual businesspeople are pretty ruthless in getting people to using their product. Open source people aren't, by nature (except for Lennart Poettering)
I watched that PewDiePie video[1] of him using Linux and I found it extremely funny that this guy was like "Linux is awesome! Freedom! (literal USA flag in the background) You are a god now!" and then every Linux-focused channel reacting to that video was like "yeah, you can play games, but not all of them. Yeah, it works, except... Yeah, you can customize but he will grow out of it when he needs to get work done..."
Linux people are downers. It's like I was watching the second coming of Stallman selling to everyone the idea that you get to control what your computer does, unlike on Windows. You can customize it, you can optimize it yourself, you can remove everything and add anything. And that he had been having so much fun doing it. The man literally told his audience that everyone should use Linux so Linux gets better. While the people who should be promoting it the most insist that "Linux is not for everyone."
It really feels like I peered into some sort of alternative reality in that video and it was really refreshing.
And I think that's the problem with FLOSS, what FLOSS truly lacks.
FLOSS tends to be merely "an alternative." It should be more than that. It should be freedom. It's absolutely ridiculous to me that I can change the font and color of the text of my post on Tumblr, a proprietary closed source social media, but I can't do that on Mastodon, on Bluesky, on Lemmy, and I bet not even on Pixelfed or Peertube although I never really used them. Where is the freedom? I don't have the freedom to change my text color? I don't have the freedom to opt into an algorithmic feed in Mastodon because the developers have opinions about that? I don't have the freedom to follow someone from Threads because my instance's administrator wants to LARP as Internet police? Richard Stallman would be spinning in his grave if he had one.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0

Reply View | 0 replies