davehtaylor

Exactly.

Also far, far more often than not, when someone talks about “corrupt banking systems” they’re about two steps away from quoting The Protocols.

It’s all Libertarian/anarcho-captialist pablum, pushed by people who think society was a bad idea

For far too long, there’s been this idea in tech spaces that a person, regardless of how shitty they are, is automatically deserving of adulation because they’re some “10x” developer. That soft skills, and wider understanding of the landscape, are completely unnecessary. They think it’s “meritocracy” where all that matters is the code you deliver, and you can be the shittiest person on the planet otherwise. It’s created so much toxicity, so much hostility, and driven so many people away. And it’s so much more apparent in OSS spaces where pull requests seem to be the only currency people have to wield.

Those kinds of attitudes completely pushed me away from participating is nearly all Linux/OSS communities. I used to be really active on a number of forums and in irc. But that kind of shit became so overbearing it just wasn’t worth it anymore. Not to mention the fact that it felt like 75% of the people there were also 4channers and well on their way down the alt-right rabbit hole.

The point is that those “thousand” benefits for LO do not matter. That’s simply not how businesses run. It would be great if it were, but it isn’t. And your experience as an individual user with MS support is completely irrelevant with regard to business support.

If that’s your view of it, then you truly do not understand how businesses operate (especially larger companies). “Hey this is free, let’s switch to this!” isn’t a pitch. There are so many factors to consider: service, support, contracts, deployment, on and on and on. It would be great if every business adopted OSS, but they’re not going to. And that’s not a failure of one employee to convince a Fortune 500 company, for example, that LO would be a cost-saving measure.

in alot of countries, having WhatsApp becomes a must.

Why is this? I hear this a lot, but I don’t understand

Yeah, this is strange. They fork a repo, but clearly have no idea what they’re doing. Or they thought they’d just grab the code before it went down, and had no plan on what to do with it. Their website doesn’t work. The readme says “Most of the development happens on GitHub” even though they’re on GitLab.

Many users on Lemmy seem actively hostile to the idea of decentralization in a way that feels self defeating. They don’t want a better alternative to Reddit, they just want Reddit 2.0 and attempts to sway them towards something better feels like pulling teeth.

I keep seeing this, and I don’t really understand. Lemmy is a link aggregator that allows users to organize those links into categories/communities/etc, and lets people comment on the links and have discussions about them. From an end-user perspective, that’s exactly what Reddit is. So I’m genuinely curious what’s meant when people say they don’t want Reddit 2.0 from a technical perspective. From a social perspective, the toxicity, brigading, shitposting, etc are definitely not desirable. But with shit moderation tools, those sort of things don’t get sorted, and federation just magnifies all of those problems. Though I think disabling voting definitely helps discourage shitposting and low-effort responses.

But I genuinely do think a lot of problems really come down to the fundamentals of federation. And given how many downsides there are to it, I’m not convinced it’s actually a benefit at all.

Eclipse is a popular IDE that’s super customizable and extensible. They have a huge marketplace of plugins. And swear I remember there being a WYSIWYG editor for it, but now that I’m searching, it seems there might not be anymore.

I definitely understand the pain though.

We have experimented with CMS options, but had various issues arising from this - lack of customisation/design flexibility (each individual page we create often has a completely unique design based on the content

I’m a web dev who got their start back in the 90s. I’m also an enthusiast for classic computers and restoring them. One of the biggest problems is that older web browsers won’t view anything with HTTPS, have no idea how to render modern web languages, and modern browsers make a mess of classic sites (though this is also an effect of much larger screen resolutions). So I was working on a project to try to build sites on the modern web that older browsers could view, using like HTML3, with no CSS nor JS. I had this ambitious idea that maybe there was a way to create a CMS that could build older sites like that. I was trying to use a headless CMS that I could take content from with a modern frontend for a modern experience, and then build a backend that could wrap the content up in 90s-tastic style. And it’s possible if you want just a generic, bland and basic site. But if you want anything that looks like things did then, it’s impossible. Like you mentioned, everything was so bespoke. so often pages then were built largely with images: navigation, layout, styling, etc. Everything was so unique, custom, and specific to the site. It wasn’t like now where everything is based on the exact same grid, or Bootstrap theme, or WP theme.

The sad part is that there were so many WYSIWYG editors back then that you could use, and even web-based ones (Angelfire, Tripod, Geocities, etc) but all that’s gone now. I did find a copy of Dreamweaver 1 and 2 on MacintoshGarden and gave that a spin for a bit on an old PowerMac G4. That was fun, but I can’t remember if they had a Windows version during the 90s. Though as hard as it is to get even 10 year old software to run on Win 10 and 11, that probably wouldn’t work anyway.

Long-winded way to say: the divide between the 90s and now, wrt web tech, is vast. Not sure how close this is to what you’re trying to do, but thought I’d share it.

I’m pretty sure that most people are mature enough to differentiate between an organization that makes software and nothing at all to do with kids and/or sexuality and that old wierdo’s personal views.

That’s not how PR works.

We live in a world where huge corporations with a revenue higher than the GDP of many countries routinely exploit child labour and work their workers to death or suicide, burning whole countries and pushing climate change while at it. And yet we collectively shrug and still buy Nestle, Apple, Samsung or H&M.

This is just whataboutism.

A shitstorm towards such a niche and unknown organisation as the FSF really doesn’t matter. We all know the Stallman and the FSF, because we are into computers, software and/or open source. But ask any random person on the street, thew wouldn’t know who Stallman or the FSF is if you told them that it’s not Android but actually Chrome/Android SDK/Dalvik/Toybox/Linux that runs on their phone.

So just because the FSF is a niche org, we should just ignore the problematic public statements by it’s founder and the person who’s always been at the forefront of their PR?

Tbh, this just sounds like free speech absolutism apologia. Yes, people can say whatever they want. But they are not free from consequences. I want nothing to do with an org that would have Stallman as a part of it. I don’t want to be associated with anyone who would. If you continue supporting an org that supports someone like Stallman, then both you and the org approve of the things he’s saying. Period. Your words mean nothing. Your actions speak for themselves.

For a random, non-public-facing employee, sure. But Stallman is the founder, and has always been the face and the voice of the FSF. He’s their mascot, their evangelist. He’s the one people see and think of when they think of the FSF. If he’s out here spouting extremely problematic views, and the FSF continues to employ him, then it looks like the organization as a whole is supporting those views.

The reason why firefox and chrome work so well, is that they literally have been in development for over a decade. In Firefox’s case, it’s actually over two decades now.

Firefox’s legacy goes all the way back to Mosaic from the early 90s.

And yeah, browser engines are hard. I mean, I get wanting Mozilla to be more financially independent, but without the money they get from Google for the search deal, they basically wouldn’t exist. It’s a really shit situation we’ve reached.

Society was not ready for Open Source and society is is becoming less and less ready.

I think this is true for a lot of software in general. The average person is becoming less and less tech literate as time goes on. You’d think it’d be the opposite, since we’re so saturated with technology now compared to 25 years ago. But we’re moving so rapidly away from general purpose platforms, and more open ecosystems. A large number of my family don’t even own a desktop or laptop computer. They have a phone and maybe a tablet, and that’s it. And then you look at the state of the web and Internet, and how most digital lives revolve around a handful of tightly controlled walled gardens, with people being extremely reluctant to branch out to explore or experiment with other apps, sites, or services. I’ve seen people, even on here, say that they don’t want another login to some app or service, so if they can’t get what they want where they already are, then they’re not interested.

Over the past 25 years of my life as a software engineer, I published both Open Source and commercial software. Only the commercial software has ever made a noticable return.

And this ties into the last point there: people simply aren’t purchasing software anymore. Even a few bucks for a mobile app seems a bridge too far for a lot of people. Your average user doesn’t spend money on desktop software. Unless they’re a power user or a business user (where the cost might be shifted to the business), they’re just going to use an OS’s built in tools, or Google docs or something like that. PC gamers may spend a lot of a rig and on games, but they’re a small market focused on very specific purchases. Even in the mobile space where everyone is now, the only ones making money are predatory subscription- or micro-transaction-based games.

The result is that fewer and fewer software is released as Open Source and instead distributed as Cloud-based commercial SaaS.

Exactly. And that only further decreases the control the user has over their computing lives. But the problem is: we as software devs are generally the only ones who care about OSS. The average user couldn’t care less. They’re not going to modify or redistribute it. They just want a tool or app or service that does what they want, and they don’t care what happens behind the scenes.

I really think our shift away from general purpose computing toward locked down devices and walled gardens is driving a great deal of the problem. Add the problems of capitalism, the fact that it’s so hard to get a small project off the ground without the dev burning out, and it really is a crisis. People like to think of the Linux kernel as an example a big project made by hobbyist, but it isn’t. Companies like Oracle, Google, Intel, et al are the largest contributors. So what do we do when the most prominent examples of OSS are driven by companies who’s primary goal is lockdown, lock-in, and control?

I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer is.

Many, many sites and services block Tor, and for good reason. It’s a massive attack vector. Yes, there are legit uses for it. But the legit users pale in comparison. If you run a financial institution, for example, or anything that houses sensitive personal information, are you willing to allow an entire threat model to attack, just to let the handful of legit users from that model? No. You wouldn’t.

Not defending or adding to what OP is talking about, I genuinely don’t understand what they’re on about, but just replying to your comment. When doing web development, one way to test out your site for accessibility purposes is to view it in a command line browser, since the way a cli browser sees it is how a screen reader is going to see it and parse it.

From the perspective of screen readers: yes

For example would you visit a website if it was hosted on Windows server? If they use ESXi? Or if user account are managed with Active Directory or firebase?

I’ve known people who were absolutely like this, who wouldn’t use a site/service/etc. because it wasn’t on a 100% FOSS stack. It’s tiresome.

I’m all for open source, open standards, being able to modify and share the tools you use, etc. But people like that are extremists who seem to go out of their way to undermine their own credibility and message.

Yeah, when I hear things like this, what I hear is “I was a user of a site/community/forum/etc. that got banned for hate speech, brigading, etc.” Hopefully that’s not the case here, but these days when you see people talk about “censorship” or “exclusion” or whatever wrt internet services that almost always what it ends up being

The biggest improvement I’d want to see is the AppleTV app. UI/UX are mostly fine, but it has such a hard time actually getting the streams, or it will freeze if you try to scrub, or the quality will be awful. It’s mostly not usable. Wish I solid with Swift dev, I’d love to jump in on that one.

The UX is abysmal to the point of being user-hostile, the name of the software is an abelist slur, and also has sexual connotations (the founders are aware of both issues with the name, with the latter being the intention behind the name, and explicitly no intentions of addressing the former). There’s just nothing positive about it whatsoever.

Rando there is really talking about about putting elections on a blockchain and trying really hard not to say the word.