We can hope for the best outcome, but I rather anticipate the worst, all things considered.

The republicans always want tit for tat in everything, and anything the democrats think is common sense they figure should just pass on the merits.

That’s not how ya get shit done.

Sounds like a pretty good feature request XD by no means do I want to see lemmy be an exact copy of reddit, but you can follow people over there, and it seems a usefull thing to do.

My problem with masto is that it’s a pretty decent twitter replacement that I found while looking for a facebook replacement. I figured out two things real quick: I really didn’t want use anything similar to facebook after all, and while masto came a bit closer to what I’d wanted, in the five or six years I’ve used it since, I’ve become a master of cooking my thoughts down to 500 characters.

I don’t feel like it was a productive challenge; more often than not I came away feeling semi-muted.

I’ll call it the twitter limitation, because I know masto kind of inherited it.

I just found it limiting. Go figure :)

THAT SAID, the masto devs make really good software, without qualification.

This Is The Way.

This article seeks to normalize, trivialize and reduce to an offhand consideration a problem that is likely to be nearer and of much greater concern to us all than most would be inclined to think.

Wots the scoop, Chef?

When I was a child, a lot of things now made primarily in China and Taiwan were made in the United States or Japan. Things of particularly good quality and of advanced technology came from the US; cheap trinkets came from Japan, and China was literally starving. When we wouldn’t finish our meals as children, our mothers would literally tell us 'there is a starving child somewhere in China right now who would love to have (insert child-hated food here).

China does so well because in the 70s and 80s the large corporations shipped manufacturing jobs and technologies to Japan and China. China literally does so well because Americans who needed things made got too greedy. Since then much of the skilled working class in America has disappeared, because if there are not jobs for you then what good is training and education? Until Americans stop subsidizing Asia without consumer-driven outsourced manufacturing, China will continue to do well. After that? Chinese policy will really matter to the Chinese, who still have not developed the means to feed their vast populations.

oK, I will cheerfully admit that you weren’t imagining things; that said, I think the masto devs have generally made at least the appearance of evil here, which is potentially as bad as just plain old evil.

Limiting access to FOSS is bad. Everyone involved in FOSS knows that. If they were going to do something like this, they could have at least kept it between themselves and their beta testers, and not made a point of telling everyone they had to be a patreon supporter to get access. Do they have an interest in the success of patreon? if not, what then is their motivation in using a selection metric so directly associated with their cash flow? At some point, they must understand that a donation is made voluntarily, and if you require a donation, now or previously - your software or service is simply not free, and you have been made to pay for it, and that payment is not a donation but a charge.

For the record, I’m not overly invested in your opinion of me. I’m simply sharing my views. I respect your right to differ with me ;)

Hey thanks, I will give that a look :)

I guess you don’t have matching statistics for other economies, you know, to maybe add some perspective to your asswertions. But no, I guess not, as your goal is to demean and divide, not present a proper picture of any one state of affairs.

Hmmmm, whatever floats your boat. I find it highly constraining, but I do like to go on. No doubt the result of a couple years of instruction in collegiate level English composition.

Also, it’s more a platform limitation (masto tries to go head to head with twitter) than anything,

In any case, the source of my actual butthurt with mastodon today is this thing they’re doing with the android beta. Where you have to be subscribed to their patreon to get it. Honestly, I dgaf about getting the android client; I hate my phone and it’s because of the handcuffed, bastardized linux it runs. However I am deeply committed to FOSS, having developed, tested and in fact made a living with it for decades. My beef isn’t that I think everything is supposed to be free, it’s that I think anything advertised as FOSS damn well better be free or they can anticipate hearing from those pf us who take Free and Open damned seriously. There are a million ways they can directly support themselves in developing mastodon without practically taking a segment of their user base hostage for the FOSS code.

That Is Not The Way.

That was true before there was Russ aggression against Ukraine.

If you want to fix the world, fix the world. Don’t blame all the world’s problems on a single unjust action against a backdrop of a sea of such actions.

Actually, so would I for almost everything - except journalism. Why? because wikipedia was never intended to be used that way. Reading news there is like searching for a palimpsest on a roll of recycled toilet paper. Sure, it could be there, but why would you ever think to look there for it?

Wikipedia has a big part to play, but this kind of thing just brings the information war right up onto the pages of what is arguably the best reference we have.

Curation suggests that we should protect it from becoming involved in an ideological tug of war lest it be damaged in the process.

just…NO.

This is not FOSS. This Is Not The Way.

Sure, just quit calling it free and open source software

Like it seems with many people right now, you clearly don’t understand what FOSS is.

Yeah but you are imagining their motives and predicating their future actions on the products of your imagination.

None of that is happening for any of those reasons. This makes any outcomes you anticipate, well, I’ll be kind and leave it at ‘unlikely’.

I think it’s one more incentive not to use mastodon.

Whats more is this: People who sign up to work on a FOSS project should have 0 anticipation, ZERO ANTICIPATION of being paid for their work on that project.

Start a consultancy around it? Sure. Charge to host instances? You bet. Combine those things with other value adds? Certainly. A patreon to facilitate a living while working on FOSS code? questionable. Insist on payment (that’s patreon, people) to push your FOSS contributions to the public? Sorry that is NOT FOSS.

Expect to be paid for FOSS contributions? Maybe you should look up the definition of FOSS, then maybe do something to experience the community. It’s about creating and donating value to the community, for the sake of that community, not self enrichment.

The concern is retaliation for the crap perpetrated by the software authors who nuked disks based on the IP address appearing to be Russ. That misguided and unethical attempt at armchair warfighting cost far more to the people fighting the Russ than it did the Russ themselves.

It’s a fucking war , people. It involves us all, like it or not, because that is how the aggressor has played it.

You can tell when you’re in a fight when a thug is punching you in the face. That you don’t choose to respond in your defense doesn’t mean you’re not involved. It just means you’re an idiot taking an ass kicking.

“Erode the US Dollar”

That’s been going on for some time. Both China and Russia have been quietly divesting themselves of the US Dollar for some years. It isn’t really news, but it makes great propaganda, because it’s true and relevant and can be disconnected from time in such a way that it can be leveraged as needed to show what a bunch of weak ass punks we Americans must surely be.

On a different note, that sword you’re yanking on is the still rooted tooth of a sleeping dragon.