I think even before that, there were major issues. The pandemic just made it so we couldn’t ignore them any longer. Which is ridiculous given how much people were acting out. But now everyone is aware of how important it is, because so many were trapped with their own thoughts and/or monotony. Even so, our governments paid lip service and then failed to make meaningful changes. My government cares more about getting people back into the office than making sure mental health care is accessible to everyone.
I agree. I became an adult during the pandemic, and the way mental health is approached towards children and teenagers is really really bad and has only gotten worse these past few years.
The thing is, there’s so many people that want to help and can change things. But they just don’t have the access. For my grandparents, University was free and then when those people graduated, they slapped a charge on it. So we have less people able to afford to study it, let alone do the job where their open salary is now less than McDonalds. It’s so stupid.
The pandemic just exposed the lie that in the worst case, the government, or your job, or someone in power, would help you.
There’s not really much “going back” from that realization, especially when we can literally find news articles every day about how another politician is campaigning against us for one thing or another.
Today, for instance, I discovered that Arkansas had passed a law to make it possible to criminally charge librarians if they lend out the “wrong” books to people!
We live in a system that isolates people and makes them fill their lives with long hours of dull work for fear of becoming penniless and homeless, while they watch this crazy consumption led by sociopathic billionaires destroying everything they love about the planet day by day. And then when people are miserable because of these problems, they receive pills and conversation (if they’re lucky enough to be able to afford them) while the material problems continue. It’s no wonder we’re all a bit messed up.
Capitalism is shit. We’re brainwashed to believe that there’s only so much and we have to get as much as can and before everyone else, damn the cost, even if it’s our mental health. I don’t understand how we can’t look at it from the other angle and say, if there’s only so much, let’s protect it. Let’s share what we have so everyone can have fun. Let’s care about everyone and lift everyone up.
I still think it changes the calculus for how it feels moderating an online space when you’re volunteering vs when you’re getting paid for it. The latter can let you emotionally datach yourself from it. The former? It’s an act of love for which you receive hate
Very few moderators on reddit are getting paid anything to moderate subreddits, the key difference is that lemmy is still in the early stages of moderation tools.
If those “moderation tools” means something like the automated blanket moderation with no recourse that’s going on Reddit… we already have that, it’s Reddit and pretty much every other for-profit platform where “some false positives” are acceptable as long as they don’t damage the income sources by offsetting the influx of new users.
At least a few third-party apps are being adapted to Lemmy, those were where most of the richest moderation tools were. Reddit has a pretty substantial, matured API to handle a lot of those moderation tasks. That’s where Lemmy needs to catch up more than anything else when talking about moderation. I think that moderation in Lemmy will be important, there’s a lot more at stake for these communities if proper moderation is not in place.
I disagree. When you are paid for it you become reliant on it to make ends meet in your life, so you’re more willing to put up with absolute garbage that you shouldn’t have to. This forces people to try to detach from it as a coping mechanism while they fall further down the hole. Paying them won’t change a thing about the mental health issues and will probably make it worse.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t pay them, but we shouldn’t look at it as the fix for this either.
Except you’ve actually changed nothing. Apple forces all third party browsers on their devices to use WebKit (the Safari engine) for the backend, so really all changing browsers does is give you a reskin under Apple’s thumb.
Luckily there’s one mainstream and about a half dozen non-mainstream mobile OSes besides Apple, and almost anyone looking for the best in anything would not have Apple hardware in the first place.
My parents have never explicitly said this, but this seems like something my dad would think.
They don’t have to pay for it, though. I’ve asked to buy a Fairphone with my money that I earned from my job several times, but they wouldn’t budge and I eventually just gave up.
Actually, I have. It gives me better tracking protection than vanilla Safari, it allows me to use SearXNG, and it means I can set a custom homepage. Also, for some reason, Safari has no private mode on my phone.
Not to mention that Mozilla is working on a Gecko-based version of the browser, as Apple is being forced by the EU to allow sideloading, third-party app stores, and third-party browser engines.
Well, there is NextDNS (and other providers, such as AdGuard DNS, rethinkDNS, and AhaDNS). It’s not a VPN, and it’s what I’m currently using alongside ProtonVPN (through WireGuard).
I just got a new router that puts the whole network behind Mullvad via WireGuard … getting the headless pihole to play nice was fun, but I’m pretty stoked that my phone now falls under that umbrella.
I have it but I have never really had much reason to use it over iphone + content blockers + DDG search.
I guess it’d be helpful for syncing bookmarks with desktops where I use firefox, but I don’t really worry about that, and as for passwords, I’ve got Bitwarden for that.
While Gecko should absolutely be made available for iPhone, it's worth noting there's nothing wrong with WebKit per se. It's open source (forked from KHTML), servers as the base for among others the GNOME Web browser, and is not a monopoly player (outside of iPhones).
In some messed up way, Apple's WebKit insistance has helped competition in the browser market by making sure there's at least one popular platform where Blink is not dominating...
Damn, I never saw it that way. In that regard the EU regulation could actually harm the browser market, because it lowers the incentive for service providers to support anything but Chrome. At the moment that would exclude all iPhone users (which hurts business, because that’s a lot of users with large pockets). But then they could simply shrug and tell their users to install Chrome. 😐️
In the other way, there are multiple hacky workarounds needed for bugs Apple is too lazy to fix, since everyone has implemented workarounds on their end. I guess the pendulum swings in both ways… luckily, there are enough people using firefox on desktop , so that at least gecko is supported basically anywhere (this would still apply to webkit since most iPhone user just use the standard and don’t bother installing alternative browsers, except if their business uses Microsoft which forces you to have edge installed to open links from teams)
There’s nothing wrong with Blink per se either. It’s open source, forked from WebKit. This argument that a free open source project becoming a monopoly is a problem has some fundamental issues with it. Not to mention there are glaring counterexamples. The Linux kernel, the GNU suite among many others.
Blink is open source, but it’s more in a look-but-don’t-touch sort of way. Google uses their position to push their own standards without consulting others. This has the effect of making the web less open, since it is more closely tied to a single implementation.
It doesn’t really compare to Linux very well, as it’s very rare for an application to only support linux unless it’s very niche or for some reason tied to Linux. You don’t go to some government service site and have it show a banner “sorry, we only tested this on Linux, everyone else use that.”
OK, this is the standard argument so I’ll try to shine a light into the holes in it.
Blink is open source, but it’s more in a look-but-don’t-touch sort of way. Google uses their position to push their own standards without consulting others. This has the effect of making the web less open, since it is more closely tied to a single implementation.
The first part where it’s open source in a look-but-don’t-touch way is obviously false since anyone entity can fork Blink and change it in the manner they see fit. For example to remove changes done by Google they disagree with. This is not a hypothetical, there are multiple forks that do this and are used by enough people to show on market share charts.
Then the next part about Google driving changes into Blink that hurt the open web, which is true, falls apart because of the above hole. There already are forks that do this. The open web doesn’t see the browser source code, just its behavior. A Blink fork that doesn’t support Google’s new DRM dream or Privacy Sandbox for example is no different to a web app that looks for these features than Gecko without support for them in this regard. The effect of X% of browsers supporting DRM and Y% not on the open web is the same regardless of exactly what source code was used to compile those browsers.
So let me add another leaky argument that’s typically leveled against the forking solution - that it’s too difficult and that Google can make it even more difficult. The software engineering world has lived with large forks since the beginning of the open source movement. Maintaining a fork even of a codebase as complex as Blink is not an insurmountable task. In fact browser engines have been forked and maintained for a long time proving this is false. We even have an example of maintaining forks of Google’s projects. The Android OS comes to mind. This is actually one I personally have lived with as part of my job. CyanogenMod lived with it, along with all the currently active projects today. The amount of work needed to reimplement large codebases is not smaller than the effort needed to change parts of it, until these parts begin approaching the size of the modules they change. It might look easier way to inexperienced engineers but this is proven to be false by the existence of counterexamples.
Finally on the point of Linux, there’s plenty of important applications that do use APIs only available on Linux, which hasn’t been POSIX for a long time. Just look at the massive use case of Linux containers and the large software projects using it - Docker, Podman, etc.
In conclusion, when Google makes changes to Blink that people disagree with, it gets forked. That’s already a reality and by all accounts much smaller teams than Google’s are able to do this. This is true for all forkable open source projects and It’s not unique to this situation. It’s a fundamental difference between open source projects and proprietary where this defensive option is not available. Monopoly of a proprietary software can absolutely and often does cause harm to it’s users. Open source software under a license that allows forking simply cannot do this.
All of the above is grounded in fact.
Now on an opinion note, I think Mozilla can actually have stronger counterbalance effect if they forked Blink removed disagreeable features from it, implemented theirs, and replaced Gecko with it. Replacing Gecko would remove the “I can’t use Firefox because it doesn’t work for X” that is currently hampering its adoption. Where X isn’t one of the disagreeable features of course. If Opera can do it, so can Mozilla. In fact if they did that, chances are that every other browser that is in alignment will switch to Mozilla’s fork instead of maintaining their own, increasing Mozilla’s influence over the direction of web standards.
In case you’re taking me for someone that doesn’t believe in Mozilla’s mission, I do use Firefox and contribute a monthly sum to Mozilla.
“Open source is free if you don’t value your time.” (forgot who that quote is from)
Sometimes the time investment is small, but especially for complex software, the friction of switching from one imperfect (proprietary) software to another imperfect (open) software makes it not really make much sense unless the issue is severe (house is half destroyed).
This is basically what he was saying. Open source tends to be a much less plug-and-play out-of-the-box experience, and usually requires at least some IT know-how for it to not be an infuriating experience. A lot of FOSS advocates compensate for that by kind of being that over explaining bro meme and get kinda pushy about getting people over the technical barriers because they want FOSS to be widely adopted and be a real alternative, and for good reasons. But most people don’t have the time or patience to stumblefuck their way through IT issues, they just want the shit to work.
It’s a fair criticism, accessibility is a big problem in FOSS. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go.
For the last decade my job has consisted of helping IT administrators manage open source software. Even if they've got all the certifications in the world they get stuck. A lot. Like, so much that I'm amazed the Internet works at all.
And then the get angry, like the computer is going to respond to their anger. They stop reading error messages. They forget to look at logs. They can't just stop and read and think.
The computer doesn't care that you're angry. It's a Turing machine, and it can do anything a Turing machine can do provided it's told to do the correct things.
Well, it’s mastodon. You’ve got a little over 400 characters to say what you’re going to say in the most shocking, attention-getting way possible. Yes, it’s not a perfect analogy, but no metaphor is perfect or else it wouldn’t really be a metaphor, would it?
Anyway, it’s a time and convenience cost that becomes extremely significant as your IT proficiency decreases, and you’ve got another think coming if you think those costs don’t matter to people.
Okay, I guess. This isn’t really a hill I’m prepared to die on. The point is that it’s still a cost that’s real to the user, even if it’s not a direct financial one.
Kind of off topic, but you can change how many characters your mastodon instance allows. Mine allows 1337 (for some reason) and I know many have it unlimited. I don’t know about TC’s instance.
I’ve spent a lot of time on both windows and a bit less on Linux and I can firmly say I’ve spent far more time troubleshooting on Linux than on Windows.
Windows tends to give me bullshit like audio crackling or nvidia’s stupid fucking software. With Linux the issues tend to be far more drastic, such as UI problems with every window, or misconfigured packages fucking with the entire OS, or an entire operating system just not functioning correctly with my hardware.
A lot of this I could fix by not being such an idiot by how I use Linux, but in my defense at the time I didn’t know best practices for using Linux as a general user, and a lot of internet guides sure didn’t explain the dangers of what I was doing. Meanwhile, I’ve never fucked myself enough to need to reinstall windows by reading online guides.
I’m glad I stuck with Linux long enough that it’s what I always put on my laptops no matter what, but man I would not want to put that on others, especially people with working lives.
I’d like you to meet windows 11. Windows 11 bricked my Alienware computer for two weeks until I said fuck it and installed Linux. They pushed an update that triggered the Bitlocker secure boot policy, which is annoying but not a problem. Except that the Bitlocker recovery key page on Microsoft’s website has been down for over a month. There’s other users like me who’ve had their machines bricked because Microsoft fucked up a webpage and can’t be assed to do a git revert. It took me hours of navigating Microsoft’s intentionally terrible support pages to figure out how to talk to a person (over IM, phone support is not a thing anymore), another 40 minutes to get a support tech on the chat, and then they told me that basically my options are to wait or wipe the drives and re-install windows 11.
I didn’t want to wipe my drives, I liked my drives, but I’m not going to just let a machine sit there and be bricked for three months until Microsoft can be assed to un-brick it. So, I wiped the drives and installed mint. I can’t play all the games I used to (I can access probably 75% of my game library) but the performance is WAY better, like, obviously and shockingly better. Turns out that Bitlocker throttles your SSD performance significantly, and it also helps when your OS isn’t trying to both run a game and send your delicious, delicious data to ad servers or whatever.
And windows wants even more live service dependencies with 12? Fuck that. I’ve been with them since '95, but I won’t follow them there. 11’s live service dependencies have been a disaster, and I can’t see myself getting excited about even more of that.
It still is more browser share for Chromium. Business owners will see that share and use it as part of the business case in implementing WEI. If you want it stopped, you gotta use a real alternative such as Firefox.
Crypto isn’t mandatory in brave, I use it for it’s built-in ad block and they say they won’t implement Google’s DRM, also blockchain based since is nice
I’m aware, but it’s still supported, and that’s enough for me to vomit over a garbage product.
They say they won’t implement Google’s DRM but words alone do not matter. If they continue to use Chromium, they’ll be forced to adopt that and manifest v3.
Agree with the chromium dominance but ats up with crypto?
Its bloat in the browser but I spend maybe 5 mins turning those off and they never bother me again. Haven’t seen one of their features magically turned on like what MS does.
Have they done anuthing sketchy to question their privacy commitments? Most I’ve seen was their Tor implementation was improper.
Better comparison would’ve been something like “Annoyed with your landlord? Go build a cabin in the woods!”. Like, that’s straight-up appealing to some people, but it’s also not just something anyone and everyone can do.
Even then that’s not that accurate, more like move to a different place. It’s inconvenient and might not have all the same things you wanted/liked from your old place but you can actually change things in the new place if you really want to
It is the same reason why tons of airports still run on Windows XP.
They already have documented every single issue that could even happen and their solution. Having a new OS would mean new problems that won’t be solved in less than 5 minutes. Which at an airport could mean lives are at stake.
And no, I can’t simply stop using or ask friends to move to an alternative. I’m from Brazil and that thing is so popular and mainstream, that even stores or public services use it.
Just this week, I had to report an animal abuse case to the authorities, and the official communication channel I had to use was through whatsapp.
It’s sad to see how dependent of a single proprietary service for something so important we allowed ourselves to become…
Likewise from Brazil and likewise would rather see whatsapp gone from my devices. Sadly, I still need it for work and other official matters. Still, I'm slowly but surely abandoning whatsapp, by either convincing people I talk to to migrate to other, less anti-consumer services, migrating myself to sister groups or alternatives in other services, and/or abandoning a group or chat altogether. And all the while being vocal about it by raising my concerns about whatsapp (just saying "I don't like it and you should move too" can be pretty counter-intuitive with our countrymen). Hopefully, this way, I can drop it altogether once it becomes clearly irrelevant.
But this reminds me I haven't deleted/left any chats for a few days, so I'll take the opportunity to do just that.
You can use a FOSS app at your end to chat with WhatsApp users, if this isn’t something you’re already aware of. Element.io plus a bridge. Beeper.com is a turnkey platform that sorts it all out for you.
It doesn’t help replace WhatsApp as a platform, but perhaps it would suit you?
I have been looking at this possibility, but running a bridge means that I will need to self host a service, which adds one more point of failure, while not really removing whatsapp from my life, so I’m not convinced it’s a good alternative.
That’s what beeper.com does. It’s also open source, but they handle running it for you.
But absolutely I agree that it doesn’t remove WhatsApp from your life, and that’s a pain point for me also when I’m working with services in Asia, who like Brasil predominantly work from WhatsApp.
If you don’t like Beeper, you could try these guys who host a managed solution (means you don’t have to deal with any issues), and let’s you offer the service to others:
Yes and no. No, in that the bridge code is published, and it takes no action other than re-encrypting your message with the destination auth. But you have to trust that server. If you don’t trust the server, then you can run your own. Running your own Matrix server isn’t all that hard; I’ve done it before and there’s an Ansible playbook which does all the heavy lifting for you. But these days I prefer someone to run it for me.
Hey. How have I just found out about this?! Mind blown. Thank you so much for sharing! Franz and such just weren't cutting it for me...this looks amazing.
How often do bridges to proprietary services break though?
I used to run bitlbee to use many chats in my irc ckient like 10-15years ago, and I remember things like google chat plugin breaking at least every month.
I last ran it myself a couple of years ago, and it was fine. These days I’m using Beeper, and I haven’t had any dropouts as an end user. If there are issues, they’re dealing with it not me.
I can confirm, sort of. I’m not from there nor have I been to Brazil specifically but I’ve been to South American and Asian countries where it’s nearly as ubiquitous as using native calls and texting in the US.
Guy wanted to vent about smart thermostats, explicitly said he doesn’t need advice and got bajillion responses with advice, mostly from FOSS folks who couldn’t contain themselves. I’d be annoyed too.
It was for me too because I wasn’t following anyone. As soon as I started following people that had strong opinions about technology and politics, well…
It doesn’t help that Mastodon has very little design considerations for dealing with popular accounts, treating every account as if you’re only following your friends and family. (Emphasis mine)
Came to the same realisation myself. The whole “just friends having lunch together” vibe that mastodon aims for simply breaks down at a certain scale, which means is essentially unsuitable as a Twitter replacement for all that looking for that.
The lack of any feed/notifications management then means that you get subjected to all the annoying randos as though they are your friends or neighbours.
Which, coupled with a culture of purism and gatekeeping and HOA-ing leads to what can be a genuinely toxic culture. Not for everyone all the time but enough of the time for some to have found it awful and left.
But not enough talk about this. It’s designed as a suburban social media where you chat to friends and neighbours. Push it beyond that and you’ll have problems.
No. Thinking about the panda is involuntary in that scenario. Typing up and submitting an explicitly unwanted response is not involuntary. It's a thing a person chooses to do expressly against the wishes of the person making the request.
I think the article does raise some interesting points, particularly around the disconnect in non-technical people having absolutely no understanding of open source software and the lack of funding (including government tax incentives) to creating and maintaining open source software.
There are some projects that are doing well, completely unfunded by corporations, but they’re definitely in the minority. And most of the successful ones have a freemium model or are related to piracy or ad blocking or some other philosophically- or economically-motivated project.
Also, GNU foundation , software, and license were product of community efforts. Just like science. We only see names because of our own biases towards the cult of personalities. Imho this is bc everyone wants to be a hero, and no one likes thinking we are just pieces playing a role that can very much be carried out by other people sooner or later. That’s why we all should be doing our greatest efforts, even if you are not the legend you may want to be in whatever field of work you’re doing…
I feel about that with many Software Devs that do great stuff but I cant help but think they must be pretty horrible socially. Not that level actually though.
It also helps that they are essentially a monopoly.
I know that there are technically other game launchers, but that’s always been how monopolies work. They allow a few token “competitors” that they completely control to exist.
Other than steam the only other gamelaunchers/storefronts for pc are:
EA (Only has EA games in it, which are mostly also on steam)
Ubisoft (Only has Ubisoft games, also mostly all on steam)
Epic Games (the only true competitor to steam, and everyone hates them because they aren’t steam)
GOG (storefront only, I’m pretty sure they literally give you steam keys)
Only ONE of them is a true competitor to steam, Epic Games, and they don’t have anywhere close to the usage steam does. The others are exclusive storefronts (that also have their games sold on steam) or storefronts that sell steam keys.
Steam is so deeply ingrained into the PC gaming space that I’m not sure most gamers understand how devastating it would be to get banned from steam or to have steam go under as a company. Their terms of service in relation to your “ownership” of games are a nightmare, if you get banned from steam your entire library disappears. Poof. Gone. Unrecoverable.
If there were actual alternatives to steam andiwere able to untie my library from them then I would do so in a heartbeat, but as it is my entire games library is trapped in steam and there isn’t really anyway to retrieve it without having multiple terabytes of storage space ready to just hold all of those games at the same time.
GOG does not give out steam keys, you can download all games as ‘stand alone installers’ and don’t need a launcher. You forgot the humble store (which now also comes with a launcher).
Generally agree, but your point about GOG is wrong. Not only can you install games from their platform, its also (to my knowledge) the only storefront where you can get games completely DRM-Free, since you dont need GOG Galaxy to download or install their games
Valve and Steam have pulled their fair share of shady anti-consumer moves, like the time they violated Aussie and EU consumer protection laws with their refund policy (fucking EA Origin had refunds years before Steam); there have also been allegations of it being a toxic workplace with a trans former employee claiming she was referred to as “it” by her manager.
I say this time and time again; only listen to people regarding their field of authority. For anything outside the world of software, Stallman’s opinions should not be seen any more valid or important than any other person on the internet. We should stick to that more. (What happened/happens due to his position in the FSF is a different topic)
Btw Redhat is working on rewriting code to remove racist trigger words like “slave”,“master”,“white list” and “black list”. Its crazy efford but I am really happy about that
People do the same with Musk. What anyone cares what Stallman, or Musk, says about things they know nothing about is beyond me.They both have said crazy things.
Except Musk is a disgustingly rich egomaniac who is using his money to influence the world based on shit opinions and beliefs. Stallman is just some creepy software dork that seems to keep to himself with his shitty opinions and beliefs.
They are both very committed and driven people. They both may be on the Autistic Spectrum, Musk admittedly and Stallman maybe though some say no. They both are influential. I would find it hard to choose. Free Software is in everything. Stallman is older so the majority of his work is in the past, Musk is just passing his prime. Musk is good at making money which is his benefit not ours … and hitching is name to other people’s companies and work. His own… Spacex maybe… not sure about the otgers. In terms of accomplishment a lot of both is the result of other peoples money and work… but that is the nature of things. There are other similarities…
Why anyone cares what Musk says about things he knows nothing about is beyond me.
Likely because Elon Musk has built an entire career around convincing people who know even less about the subject than he does that he is an expert in this week’s scientific field
Using this tool in beehaw will get you banned for spamming. If you choose to use this in an instance you do not own, be sure you get explicit permission from the admins + mods of the target community before you do so.
Even if a community is meant for this sort of archiving, be sure to ask first. They might have a specific set of rules on choosing what they want to archive.
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