Comment by wolvesechoes 21 hours ago
> The only ones caring about FOSS are technical minded people already working in the field.
People that fought for common hygiene standards, or labor rights, or human rights etc in the past were a minority too, because most people didn't care. But this minority was able to organize, push forward and gain support. And the fight was worth it, and improved lives of us all.
Ya think? I mean, I agree 100% that was the good fight. But to take a tangent here? That's falling apart, world wide.
It's falling apart because the average person wants to be "smart". I applaud this, the fact that people want to learn, want to know, want to understand.
Yet now, when they try to learn? To understand? They end up with youtube. Tiktok. Pages of AI slop. They're told what is "astonishing" or "proves that scientists don't have a clue!". They're told that gibberish is real, that those lab-coats are all evil, or trying to poison people, and so on. Or even better to their egos, that the lab-coats aren't so smart, and with this "one simple trick", you can be smarter than them!
This is coupled with outrage!!, when this rarely tends to be the case. Yes, there is corporate greed and it gets caught, recalls happen, mistakes happen, yet 99.99999% of the products and services just work. No one notices that aspect, only the "big news" of the tiny, rare, unusual failures of our system.
And then on top of that, politics enters the scene. Now, it's "us vs them" on matters like medicine?! Or health? Or school? What?! And no it's not just "one side", it's both sides, just in different ways.
People used to say things like "I don't know". Now people who can barely write, and read, have opinions on everything. They have no idea of the science behind things, but they'll just say "Oh! I saw this on youtube by a random person I've never heard of before! That's true, not what I learned in school!"
And the worst part is, we want people to think "being smart" is important. We want intellectual betterment. Yet now this is twisted and warped against the light of knowledge, for now everyone craves it, but are given the ashes of burned truths. All provided by false profits, so they can pocket some coin.
As far as I'm concerned, youtube and tiktok need to die. Social media needs to die. There are other solutions, but Google, Meta, the rest only care about cash, profit, and not one iota about fixing this.
So if they won't fix it? Then we must destroy it.
And can we? Nope! Because the public LOVES it. Loves loves loves it.
So back to FOSS. I've dedicated my entire life to FOSS. But the time of "making people care" about things is gone. They don't care. They never will with all this noise going on.
I'm not happy about it, but if you can't get people to even be interested about privacy violations by Google on their Android device? How will you get them to even remotely care about FOSS?
Parent is right. Only geeks care.
I agree with this sentiment 100%.
Probably the speculative FOSS project I'm most excited to think about is an open alternative to YouTube – a universal video hosting platform or network, free from commercial incentives baked into the platform.
I've only started to think about this recently so haven't explored whether it's viable to e.g. run all video hosting in a torrent-like, distributed way, or perhaps a Mastodon-like model, but the goal seems like one of the best things free software could aim to achieve right now. YouTube needs to die, and it needs an alternative that could conceivably kill it.
"But the time of "making people care" about things is gone. They don't care. They never will with all this noise going on."
Tragically, that's very true. But society and societal issues being what they are nowadays we should not expect anything else.
Most of the world's addicted users would be bereft and suffer severe withdrawal without their regular dose of Social Media. Same would apply if those 'amazing' apps provided 'freely' by that wonderful magnanimous benefactor Google were to disappear or ever be under threat.
Any notion that their treasured online ecosystem could be disrupted or their 'free' apps might be replaced with FOSS equivalents would cause outrage. With their attention spans already severely reduced, uses would never stop to consider the true benefits of FOSS, instead they'd actively fight against it.
Like a parasitoid wasp taking control of a catapillar's mind/body to benefit its offspring, Big Tech has parasitized the minds of much of the world's population before anyone realized the fact.
That this outrage has actually happened without any effective opposition is a true tragedy, to expect FOSS to reverse the situation without some cataclysmic event intervening is just a fanciful pipedream.
I always wondered where this belief that progress is given comes from.
Nothing is given in this world. Every real fruit of progress (freedom, democracy, public health etc, not iPhone) was fought for and paid with effort, sweat and blood. People were often put in jail, tortured and murdered. I am not sure what exact price you have in mind when you state you've dedicated your life to FOSS, but I somehow doubt it is comparable. It is naive to think that once we achieved something, we don't need to keep fighting in purpose to keep it. This is equally true about democracy, eradication of diseases through vaccination, and free computing.
Of course only geeks care. My point was that it was always like that. Every big societal and political change was enacted by a relatively small, but coordinated and motivated minority. Majority always is passive, and even if it comes in, it comes in at the very end of the process. The problem is not a small number of geeks that care, but rather geeks' reluctance to organize and act politically. Hell, in this demographics political is always suspicious and unworthy. There won't be any success until this changes.
It is naive to think that once we achieved something, we don't need to keep fighting in purpose to keep it.
I agreed with this in my post, but I suppose not using those words. However, I discussed how people used to pay attention to experts, and they really, really did. Of course nothing is absolute, but there is a massive change, from what I see, between 50 years ago and now.
The average person didn't want to seem "stupid", by trying to claim that germs didn't exist (because they can't see them), or that the world was flat, or whatever may be said.
Yet now, as I said, we have all these sources of just plain stupid, spewing stupid as knowledge. Before, we could enact change and at least get the public behind it.
Now (and you seem to agree here!) it's harder to do so. And we're losing ground!
So I disagree that it's about us not organizing. Very successful ways to organize and educate now fail due to this slop. It's not us, it's the world, fading, dimming, dropping back into the gibberish of the masses.
> They're told that gibberish is real,
Literally. In pentecostal churches people (even children) are taught to babble out loud as if it's divine revelation. And another to 'interpret' the gibberish in the 'human' language for everyone else to understand.
Many of these people are college educated. Yet they learn to compartmentalize to the extreme.
Social media won't die, but it can be replaced with something that is better in every way, but especially better at actually enriching our lives, rather than better at gluing us to screens and feeding us ads. It rests on us to create these decentralized systems. I think local-first software and some ideas from crypto are some good first guideposts on the way there. AI can surely help too, if used judiciously.
> Only geeks care.
This is false, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20207348
Perhaps so, but users have not done a damn thing to reverse the situation. It's Social Media and Google's apps as usual.
It's privacy bedamned when those factors get in the way. Even with the strongest will, electronic heroin, like its chemical counterpart, is almost impossible to shed.
Surely you can't be linking to a post on HackerNews, or a response, when trying to say "the average person" cares about privacy, are you?
The fact that the person is even posting on Hacker News invalidates "average person". So you must therefore be talking about the Times article?
The title of this gatewayed article is:
"You Care More About Your Privacy Than You Think"
It's literally saying that "you don't care", then trying to tell people why they should. This actually supports the premise that the average person doesn't care about privacy.
Yet beyond that, my "Only geeks care" clearly was about FOSS. Trying to invalidate my privacy statement, which everyone knows is an issue, doesn't invalidate my "Only geeks care -> FOSS" statement.
Do you really believe that if you stop 100 random people on the street, they'll even know what FOSS is? If they don't know, they do not care.
I wonder how many people know what FOSS is? What if I stopped 1000 random people in 5 rural towns, and 5 urban cities. Out of those 10k people, would even 100 know?
You might say "Oh, well if I explain it to them!". Nope.
Caring implies knowing about the issue, considering it, and worrying about it. This isn't even on the public's radar. They don't know what FOSS is. They don't even know what software is, nor do they know what files are.
Even if you sit them down, get them to listen to all sides of the issue for hours, some still won't care. At all.
And of the ones that do, what does "care" mean?
After all, upthread is discussing how the mildest inconvenience means nope, don't care. In the contexts of this thread, "caring" means "willing to use FOSS even if there are inconveniences".
FOSS software is everywhere. People could be using it. They aren't. Why? They don't care.
People have too many other problems in their life to spend efforts on every (important!) world problem. This is essentially a Maslow's pyramid. Unless it's also your hobby, you simply have no energy to spend on things which aren't immediately beneficial to you. This is not equivalent to not caring.
Good point. Wasn't going to say the fight is useless, just that those who know are the minority.