Fuck all CEOs. Stop giving them platforms & celebrity where they get to be the symbol of products/services—which discounts all the labor done into something by the real folks building & making decisions.

https://writing.kemitchell.com/2023/12/01/PolyForm-Countdown

We had B2G (Boot to Gecko) for a while. We could have had FxOS on laptops instead of one shitty midrange phone & maybe it would have worked. 😔

Until Mozilla caves & Fx fully adopts Manifest v3. I hope it doesn’t happen but would not surprise me in the slightest if they did

These have tradeoffs you don’t see when certain groups cannot participate due to personal or systemic political or philosophical reasons. You also can’t hear from that crowd since they haven’t been given a place to voice.

In the case of chat & forges, these are solved for quality free options (& even decentralized in some cases). The choice are at least in the good enough category if not better in some aspects (& worse in others). For chat a room in Libera.Chat or OFTC is free & meant for free software—even if it is labeled as unofficial it still gives folks a sanctioned place who wish to avoid Discord for privacy, security, preformance, or US services being blocked (as well as being an out-of-band option for when a server is inevitably down). For forges, living in part of world where Microsoft often heavily throttles my bandwidth & all outages are during my day time, it is never a bad idea to configure your VCS to push to a second mirror like Codeberg, et al. not just for freedom reasons but resilience from server outages & censorship (see youtube-dl or the Switch emulators or nations that have blocked the whole IP due to something governments didn’t like in someone else’s repo). When you start coding around Microsoft GitHub’s Actions or API or Discussions or any specific integration without an eye to the generic/portable approach which is easier done from the start, dependence starts to add up. While readonly mirror would suck for freedom of contributions/communications, it is an option if it is seen as too noisy or too much of a burden to support multiple forges outages & censorship are real (especially if not in the West).

“Enshitification” is the buzzword for services whose quality goes down & devolves to ads + selling user data for profit maximization—usually because they can because users/groups are now locked into the service having relied too heavily on their infrastructure. We see free software projects still stuck on Sourceforge & Slack due to lock-in. Having started with the free option, the lock-in probably can’t happen. Even having one option supported as a backup makes one cognisant of features that aren’t going to port when these US-based, profit-driven entities decide to gradually make things worse to the point where users want to leave with history showing us this has happened several times.

You might say it is pragmatic, but I think it’s both lazy & short-sighted to not have these near-zero-effort options set up even as a back up (truly can be set & forget if really wanted)—especially when you think these values are good enough for the service you are building but also interacting on Lemmy, a decentralized, self-hostable platform (who said they have every intention of migrating their code to self-hosted as soon as ForgeFed is merge for federation).

Can you expand on what you mean?

Choosing proprietary tools and services for your free software project ultimately sends a message to downstream developers and users of your project that freedom of all users—developers included—is not a priority.

— Matt Lee

Discord is linked as the only other means of communication which is even worse.

Use ’em if you want, but reconsider making them the only options

If this project sees the value of privacy & security for local & self-hosted LLM chat, why does this project only offer proprietary, corpo means for contributions & communications?

margin-inline-start: -1.25rem for the internationally-minded & accessibility-minded developer

The first page I went to was: https://ente.io/community/ where the big 3 priority links are Discord, Figma, Microsoft GitHub–these are Ente’s priority platforms. Seeing no alternative to the code forge under ‘Community’, I was curious if ‘Contact’ had listed another forge or a mailing list since this page is generally where you find email addresses. The page did not have an alt forge or mailing list, but there was a call to how they prioritize communications for their free software on nonfree Discord & MS GitHub.

Matrix sucks, but it as a chat option in the ‘better’ category. Bugs can be reported via email according to the ‘Contact’ page …but there is no other option for sending patches–not one of your 10 links.

Start with good, accesible tools you can have control of—either by self-hosting or that they have their source code available so you can suggest fixes, or migrate off later. Choosing proprietary software like this leads to inevitable lock-in so why start there if we have seen this play out many times?

I went there. I go there often usually in search of the non-garbage options that might be hidden on this page instead of a logo for a for-profit entity in the banner of every page. Sometimes you find the other communities which is good—but increasingly you don’t.

80 char line maximum? I read that as minimum. My bad.

Acronyms/intialism use capital letters to encode information about words. Losing that information is a mistake. SᴍᴀʟʟCᴀᴘCᴀsᴇ is now considered a best practice.

…Or I dunno try snake_case or kebab-case 🤷

Folks are free to do what they want with their project just as I am free to judge them for their choices. The big problem with these sort of communication decisions is that you effectively silence those that would like to raise their hand toward wanting something for them too. “We asked our Discord chat room if they like it & they all said yes, so the community has already spoken with regards to Discord”. If lazy, it is next to zero effort to say: “we also (unofficially) support a Libera.Chat/OFTC room @ #foobar” so the other folks know where to find the other ones that value their bandwidth, system resources, freedom, privacy, security, blocked by sanctions, or just sick of mainstream social media/ads.

With regards to Linux, it’s been a grassroots effort by enthusiasts that take the philosophies to heart, & it is just a shame to adopt the licensing, but not the general philosophy. As users, I think we should be more critical of these choices, but there’s a lot of shrug it would be nice, but…

I noted it in a different comment, the open options are listed at the end, it still shows the priority of the platform the devs specifically noted it in the body of the contact page, & doesn’t address the software forge + source contributions.

These do not meet the philosophical or privacy needs of users. Look at how the Switch emulator situation was handled where one megacorporation told another megacorporation to shutdown their communications & they did. Look at how US sanctions prevent users form touching these platforms. Look at how the feds & advertizers use all the collected data.

I’m sure if enough people got in contact about using open source communication they would likely attempt it

You see the chicken-egg situation here, right?

You can have multiple channels. You can bridge. You can designate some spaces as reserved but unofficial. They do list a Matrix in the finer print, but not choosing it as primary is madness IMO since the option are certainly good enough & if you believe in the philosophy you will direct your community in this direction to inspire other folks to uptake & hopefully improve our freedom-respecting options. Instead you start at bifurcating a community along lines of those that want ethical software & privacy over those who are willing/able to give it up—which as you say is definitely ironic given the marketing buzzwords chosen like “self-hosted”, “respects your privacy”, “open source”.

Since we are making open source apps and building with continuous community feedback, effectively our GitHub and our Discord are our offices.

— Contact Page

Soo the only way to really communicate with your free software project that is all about self-hosting & privacy is thru fully-closed, US-based services with ads & ToS that let them track you. Way to practice what you preach.

ATS blasting in here to give you linear types, dependent types, & refinement types with the literal performance of C—& safety beyond all 3.