- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
shutting out a significant portion of your community without seeking their input first isn’t a sensible move for such a foundational open source project.
Ironic when X shuts out anyone who isn’t logged in and shuts out anyone who doesn’t pay for a blue checkmark from having visible replies.
Having an X account isn’t consequence-free - if it becomes where updates occur, people have to sign up for an account and subject themselves to nazis everywhere and all manner of crypto spam just to see updates. And they have to pay Elon tribute to be heard in response. It’s crazy that anyone sees it as being friendly to users.
Were they using Twitter to provide exclusive updates not available anywhere else?
My impression from the post is that they are publishing the exact same updates in multiple locations, including mastodon at https://framapiaf.org/@debian …so just because they were publishing in that one extra site to make it accessible to a particular subset of people does not mean all other people were being shut off from receiving updates.
However, I do agree with the move, but only because Debian being a FOSS initiative should stay away from proprietary platforms and promote FOSS.
Kinda wondering who in that community is going to bat for Elon Musk after the last two weeks.
Nazis.
Agreed. Notably, Bluesky doesn’t require an account to read posts.
Yet
I don’t know enough detail about ATproto, but I wonder if it’s technically possible to block access to posts without also blocking federation. From what I’ve heard the functionality is more modular than Activitypub (content indexing being a separate service from content hosting) so I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t possible.
When it forces you to log in to view stuff, it’s usefulness as a platform for announcements is substantially lessened.
My town’s subreddit just started a policy to disallow links to X for similar reasons.
There is a movement to avoid the platform.
Good riddance. Stop using Nazi platforms and join the fediverse instead.
citing concerns over values and diversity.
Sigh. It’s always for the dumbest reasons that people leave these abusive platforms.
Drag values not being a Nazi and X doesn’t. This isn’t a dumb reason to stop using it.
You’re just supporting whichever platform censors what you don’t like.
Fuck off, placating Nazis does more damage to free speech than any of this.
It is a valid reason, it is also perfectly moral to use violence against Nazis.
Gonna ignore you bud.
Hope you find peace someday.
There will be peace when we have killed enough Nazis.
Right. Just completely ignore the disparity in wealth…
Gonna ignore you now btw. Goodbye.
Yeah sounds about right, enjoy your failed state.
Good, now if only OpenSource devs switched from Discord to let’s say Matrix/XMPP
We’d be partying
go back to forums. Support in discord is awful. Discord is not as searchable as a forum public on the internet
https://forums.debian.net/ exists for Debian
Yeah, forums please. I hate the idea of troubleshooting information being locked behind some stupid software we can’t easily index and search. Forums can be put on archive.org, you can literally print a page, or save it as a PDF for reviewing later. You can make use of bookmark software like Linkwarden to archive things.
Discord? Not so much. You can use third party software to scrape it and save information, but no search engine can index it. Community building is great, but I loathe having to trawl through tonnes of blithering blathering conversation BS just to figure out where to find firmware for a particular chip I have is.
Makes me want to projectile vomit all over the place, throw my computer out the window, and move to convent.
I want to move my music discord to a forum platform. Can anyone recommend a good FOSS forum with good iOS/mobile app support? Some of the musicians are going to resist if there isn’t a decent, usable, mobile app. It’s been a long time since I set up a forum. Last one I installed on a server was phpBB!
Maybe Discourse? The mobile website is pretty good and there are also a number of third-party mobile apps.
Excellent. Thank you for the suggestion. I’ll take a look at Discourse.
What about this one that you’re on right now?
I may sound too radical, but I’d go so far as to support a common Logseq knowledge graph.
Having worked on a couple of Matrix deployments over the last year, that shit needs to be simpler and easier, yo? Once the Matrix server exists, it’s easy enough to get people to use it.
Contrast it’s ease of deployment with Mumble for example.
If we’re swapping out discord, please just go with Zulip… It’s FLOSS, and has a solid company backing it that actually cares about FLOSS (They even bought the product back, after it was sold to a company that was enshittifying it)/
Zulip sounds neat!
Shoutout to https://revolt.chat/ as a Discord alternative too.
Does anyone actually use it? I put my head in every few months and it’s just a bunch of graveyard servers. Very few that have any activity so far as I can tell.
This is probably much closer to discord than Zulip is, tbh. I never knew about it previously :)
How is it feature wise? Parity with xmpp/matrix? Better?
Better. I’d say its fully on par with Discord, minus the dark patterns. There’s a public Zulip instance where you can check it out.
God I hope I live to see the day. Discord at first appears like a good IRC wrapper, but the XP of actually using it is fucking gross.
Just remove matrix from the alternatives and I 100% agree, long live xmpp😊
Meanwhile one can use: slidcord
What’s wrong with Matrix ? Well there’s SimpleX & GNU-Jami as well as Revolt
Matrix and XMPP don’t even pretend to be Discord replacements.
But they are replacements
In that case we could all just use email.
Then try out DeltaChat in that case
I’d make a blind bet on that over Matrix for suitability.
god, the replies to their tweet are awful…
Why politicize everything?
Simps for X (formerly twitter)
Those replies are why they are leaving. And good riddance to such a godawful platform.
That first reply highlights a major difference in how people approach the world.
Speaking very generally, conservatism and right wing politics seen to attract those who see everything as a competition and that dominating other people is what it means to be a good person. Funny that it also leads to frustrated, angry, isolated people.
So if we want to switch to using a website that doesn’t promote hurting/killing 2% of the population, we are now BOWING DOWN to the minority some of us would not rather murder.
It’s the same reason they hate DEI so much.
Blue checkmarks…
This is to me one of the major reasons Twitter discourse is completely ruined and the platform is mostly useless for seeing what people think now.
When the only people who get to be at the top of discussions are people who pay for twitter, the only opinions that get shared are those that are pro Twitter, pro Elon, etc. Because they have a direct stake in the game.
And that’s if the accounts posting aren’t all bots that pay for a checkmark to boost engagement, which is almost all I see when I occasionally have to check Twitter these days.
So glad more people are leaving it. There’s nothing to gain from it anymore.
Sounds like bots
It is depressing, but I try not to forget we are seeing a sort of survivorship bias of stupidity on the former Twitter at this point. The cohort of remaining posting accounts is dumber and dumber on average. And this dynamic is magnified in the replies, because they are paid blue accounts at the top. Eg, self-selected losers. (The top account has likely just hidden their checkmark)
Edit: PS, are you still using Nitter? I thought it had died?
There are still a few nitter instances alive
The replies illustrate the problem nicely.
Ah, that captures such a stark answer to why people use xitter though.
It’s not “so I can hear from you” it’s “So YoU cAn HeAr FrOm Us!!!11oneone”
Walled gardens? More like prison yard. Lol
I didn’t really need another reason to love Debian more but here we are… I’m donating to Debian today
Oh I like that rhythm.
"I’m lock up, no way Corps and hearsay Brought me to jail FOSS not too late
All I say is I’m donating to debian today"
Wild that so many are still hanging out at the Nazi bar
Its that social inertia, and I get it.
I ran a neighborhood group’s social media, and even after FB turned openly shitty, I had to stay on there, because thats where people are.
I mean, I could have pushed the org to drop them, but then we would have lost the eyeballs of thousands of neighbor’s we’re trying to work FOR.
Same deal with Twitter, they’ve just gotten to the point where most NPOs lose less by leaving than they would by staying.
That’s beginning to wane. The fewer major posters there are, the fewer people will look to the site for information. And the fewer people on there looking for info…etc.
Yep, it’s viable now for many orgs…
its not surprising considering the overlap. many linux users are cryptofascists, i.e. luke smith
Yes, I’m sadly surprised by many open source projects still posting on that cesspool
The problem is for organizations it’s harder to leave because that is where the people you want to reach are. That’s the only reason any org or company is on social media in the first place. If they leave too soon they risk too many people not seeing the things they send out to the community.
It’s more an individual thing because so many people just have social inertia and haven’t left since everyone they know is already there. The first to leave have to decide if they want to juggle using another platform to keep connections or cut off connections by abandoning the established platform.
That doesn’t explain why they don’t start a transition by posting to both the new platform and the old. And not including links to their new account on their websites.
Doesn’t Twitter directly suppress such links? I remember there was a crackdown on people linking their mastodon accounts a while back.
And external links in general get a huge suppression in the algorithm because Twitter does not want to recommend tweets that take you off the site.
The platform actively fights you if you want to move elsewhere (which should really be a telltale sign for you to move), so I get why some orgs struggle with that decision. Doubly so if your job relies on the platform’s outreach.
I’m talking about posting on their website a link to alternative social media accounts.
Because they allow smoking
Everyone who have use Twitter in the past 2 years is a nazi.
That’s a very silly take
This is a great example of where linking to a blog post about an announcement is better than linking to the announcement itself:
after digging a bit deeper, I discovered that there was originally a longer, more detailed announcement that was later scrapped. I found it in a GitLab commit made by Jean. [Link to GitLab comment in article]
Good job, itsfoss.com
Personally, I think that the discussion around this will evolve as the news spreads, but I agree with Robert on this one. Sure, X/Twitter has become a less welcoming place than before, but shutting out a significant portion of your community without seeking their input first isn’t a sensible move for such a foundational open source project.
Nah, I think I’m cool if Debian doesn’t respect the input of Nazi sympathisers.
Yeah what the fuck is with that.
It’s a very twitter centric view of the web. If you’re not on xitter you’re “shutting out a significant portion”.
The thing is, it’s not simply that Musk has an ideology that is disparate from my own, he has an agenda that is egregiously contrary to the stated values of the Debian project.
You’d consult with the community over a new logo or blog layout maybe, but on whether to assist Musk in his far right agenda there’s not really any decision to be made honestly.
Yeah, that section is bad.
For one, it’s has classic vibe “if you want to keep the nazis out, you’re the one who’s exclusionary”.
But also, how is refusing to engage on a platform “shutting out a significant portion of [the] community”? That sounds backwards to me. Blocking people from engaging with Debian on its own platforms would be shutting them out. The implication in the article is that Debian is obligated to be unconditionally present on every social platform its users might be on.
Last time they seeked input they ignored it and shoved systemd anyway…
So Wayland?
Came here to make this joke. Was an hour too late…
Care to explain?
The X Window System (aka X.Org or X11) has been the default window system in many distros. Recently there has been a new window system called Wayland, so the joke would be that Debian is dropping X11 and switching to Wayland.
Does Wayland has its own Mastodon instance? If yes, they could do a funny.
I don’t mind, actually everyone should ditch Twatter.
& all the US-based corporate social media… Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn, & GitHub.
The VC-funded ones too like BlueSky
all of the corporate social media tbh. federation is the way out of this cycle.
Nail on the head… it isn’t about one particular service or protocol but the philosophy of federation
In any case, RSS should be enough.
“640k should be enough for anybody”
I still don’t think I understand the full utility of RSS. I guess it’s good for forum communication too?
Because my first thought was “RSS is cool but first we need human-written content and blogs to come back.”
RSS to know when there’s a new post on the blog.
I’ve managed to ditch every single one of those except LinkedIn. We simply CANNOT get new clients without it. The lockin to that platform is truly terrifying. LinkedIn is a crime against humanity.
Microsoft bought these social media platforms like LinkedIn & GitHub for this very reason. They want you stuck in their ecosystems …then train their proprietary AIs on your communications, then sell it back to you when you were the one that made it.
Question: how is LinkedIn useful to you?
For me it’s just a non-stop swarm of recruiters from India who want me to kindly listen to their offer of a job that pays less than I’d make picking up garbage, utter sociopaths dredging up some psychotic hustle culture nonsense, and previous people I’ve worked with/for asking for favors, which of course means free.
Is it somehow more useful for an actual business?
I think Bluesky can be an exception. I think it’s way better than Mastodon from a UX standpoint. And it’s still open.
No.
It costs literally hundreds of thousands of USD per month to run your own node. If it isn’t accessible to the masses, it isn’t revolutionary. De facto centralization due to prohibitively expensive costs is effectively centralization—same reason we should not trust a platform like Matrix.
Bluesky is just another startup grifting with open washing. It has all the same VC-funded trappings where the history of Twitter will literally just repeat itself—like we didn’t see what happened with it the first time around.
Mastodon can improve its UX but some of these platforms are rotten to the core. Or also use something on ActivityPub that does have a UX you like since they can all intercommunicate—or XMPP PubSub Social Feed since it has stricter governance to prevent it from getting too messy.
People just don’t learn.
… Debian was on twitter??
As it turns out, having an account on a social media platform full of Nazis, violent racists, and child diddlers is not good for business.