Shocked pikachu face

“Delaying” correctly implies that the outcome is inevitable, while not voting is absolutely something that helped Trump win, in the sense that many people who had the power to affect the outcome, and thus keep Trump from taking power, failed to do so.

If you didn’t vote, it’s either because you were either happy or ambivalent about Trump winning.

Personally, I’m much more mad at the idiot non-voters who made Trump and Republican control an inevitability than I am at just about anyone else at this point. As the government stands today, just about anything that the Democrats can do is merely symbolic, as the Republicans have all of the power over the executive, legislative, and judicial branches for at least 2-4 years (assuming we even have elections in the future). Democrats are politically irrelevant, as decided by the voters (and non-voters) back in November.

I love the idea of online communities that are run by the people and not by massive tech corporations.

The idea that we had a free and open internet back in the day, only to surrender the entire thing to fascist corpo fuckwads like Musk and Zuckerberg, or hostile authoritarian government pawns like ByteDance, is a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons.

The Fediverse feels like our one and only chance to take the internet back on behalf of all people, all over the world.

You’re avoiding the point: when you have the source code, the ability to build it yourself, and the right to continue community development in any direction you want, there is nothing that a company or any other entity can do to make your experience worse.

If I don’t like the direction of Lemmy, for example, there’s nothing that stops me from forking the last known good version and continuing to use/develop that myself for the rest of time. It’s fundamentally different than if you’re someone who uses Reddit, for example, and you’re 100% beholden to the whims of what the developers decide. That’s the point I’m making.

Call me a true believer, but I think FOSS is at least extremely resilient to enshittification. I say this as a long time FOSS user and current professional FOSS developer.

I disagree, forking and personal modification are the fundamental powers that FOSS licenses like the GPL and MIT give the user. They’re the whole point of why FOSS exists in the first place–it’s not about money, it’s about giving people the power to chance the source and build things for themselves.

Copyleft takes that idea one step further by asking them to share their changes, of course.

Obviously it’s great if everyone can align their ideas and desires to work together on a single thing, but the software world also benefits from having multiple projects with different directions and goals, because one-size-fits-all is never ideal.

“open source” “AI”

I’m not familiar with either of those projects or what you mean by “that stage”, but why can’t you and the community around them just fork them and continue development in a way that you prefer? What’s stopping you?

What is Ubuntu doing to enshittify that can’t be fixed or mitigated by source modifications or forks?

I don’t get it… What is Ubuntu doing to enshittify their operating system that you can’t mitigate through source modifications or switching to another free OS?

Unlike Windows and Mac users, if my Linux distro does something that I disagree with, I feel that I have plenty of power to do things about it on multiple levels. I left Ubuntu years ago, but there are plenty of things the community can do to make things better without relying on Canonical to do anything at all.

Google puts in more development power than anyone else. Any forks we’ve seen so far are only really soft forks, as in they only apply a few patches on top of what Google puts out, rather than taking the project in a new direction, because you’d be behind pretty quickly.

Ok, but what’s stopping them other than a lack of desire?

FOSS programs can always be forked and developed independently of the original authors. That’s the “freedom” that makes them FOSS in the first place. I have no desire to make my own fork of Android and its tooling, but if someone out there really wanted to do so, I don’t see what is stopping them. (Other than things like locked down smart phone bootloaders, but that’s got nothing to do with the FOSS part of this discussion.)

Partially, it’s only financially viable for Google to develop these projects, because they have those Android ads or benefit from a web with less tracking protection. This makes it extremely unlikely for any other organization to be able to splurge a similar amount of money, which brings us back to a fork just being unlikely.

I’m kind of skeptical of this idea. FOSS has almost always been able to succeed in the long term despite having a small fraction of the development budget of proprietary software, often due to the passion of weekend devs essentially donating their time to the cause. Whether it’s Linux, Blender, Gitlab, Godot, Krita, etc., I can’t think of a single FOSS project that has funding anywhere near the same level as their corporate rivals.

Sitting quietly in the cuck chair while his owner rambles for hours about who knows what.

It absolutely does… Can you elaborate on a situation in which FOSS gets enshittified?

Instead of hoping your instance does something, just make your own instance. That’s the whole idea.

The best and most affordable way for Elon Musk to “make the world a better place” would be to drop dead.

i think this is old spice admitting that xAI is total bullshit

Well, to be 100% fair, it’s all total bullshit.

Snowden really proved he wasn’t a Russian spy when he… check notes… immediately fled to Russia with troves of American secrets…

the accepted terminology nowadays

Let’s just redefine existing concepts to mean things that are more palatable to corporate control why don’t we?

If you don’t have the ability to build it yourself, it’s not open source. Deepseek is “freeware” at best. And that’s to say nothing of what the data is, where it comes from, and the legal ramifications of using it.

The way I see it, the most important thing right now is breaking up the biggest platforms. The biggest advantage that places like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok have right now is the network effect from having a fuck ton of users. But in a more fractured social media landscape, the tools that are the most open and federated will eventually come out on top.

Sounds a lot like Linus Torvalds back in the day, just saying…