I’m not really convinced by this article. One thing struck out at me:
I am reminded of the way I put work into Mastodon for more than a year, but I never received any acknowledgement, gratitude or compensation from Gargron even though he used my ideas, because I never wrote a line of code.
Yeah, it’s easy to come up with ideas, and much harder to actually implement them well. Genius being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, and all that.
It is therefore safer for marginalised people to use centralised software under large companies that are accountable to the law.
What? Hard No. If Twitter says your use case doesn’t matter, you’re fucked. The U.S. political landscape is allergic to regulating business in a pro-consumer manner at the moment, so good luck having any of them be accountable to the law.
Also, if the main developer of Mastodon says your use case doesn’t matter, migrate to a different Mastodon host that cares about your use case. That’s the huge advantage of federated software, and why it is clearly superior for minorities.
The more I think about it, the more I see FOSS as a microcosm of capitalism
The general thrust of the article is that capitalism ignores minorities (and then comparing FOSS to that aspect of capitalism). Not that capitalism doesn’t have it’s issues, but to say that minority oppression doesn’t happen under other political systems is simply ahistorical. Humans are really good at ignoring the needs of minorities, regardless of political organization.
I’m not really convinced by this article. One thing struck out at me:
Yeah, it’s easy to come up with ideas, and much harder to actually implement them well. Genius being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, and all that.
What? Hard No. If Twitter says your use case doesn’t matter, you’re fucked. The U.S. political landscape is allergic to regulating business in a pro-consumer manner at the moment, so good luck having any of them be accountable to the law.
Also, if the main developer of Mastodon says your use case doesn’t matter, migrate to a different Mastodon host that cares about your use case. That’s the huge advantage of federated software, and why it is clearly superior for minorities.
The general thrust of the article is that capitalism ignores minorities (and then comparing FOSS to that aspect of capitalism). Not that capitalism doesn’t have it’s issues, but to say that minority oppression doesn’t happen under other political systems is simply ahistorical. Humans are really good at ignoring the needs of minorities, regardless of political organization.