Hi, I work on a variety of things, most of which I talk about more on my blog than on social media. Here, you’ll probably find me talking mostly talking about Free Culture works and sometimes technology.
The Indie Web website up there actually has protocols to do most of what people do for social media, in exactly that structure. It’s enough of a pain to set up that I don’t see it becoming normal, but the amount that I’ve set up for my website at least works…
Likewise, feel free to reach out if you need a hand. I don’t always have time, but I do my share of weird programming.
Always good to see more effort to surface these things. A couple of possible enhancements come to mind.
Thanks for getting this rolling!
I only just learned about this, so haven’t signed up or checked out the communities and therefore won’t endorse it, but Codidact just came across my desk. https://codidact.com/
The only dedicated site that I know of is the Iranian Tasnim News, though Global Voices has some writers in the general area, too.
Yep. You can’t take a direct request to stop harassing me. Blocking, like I should have done when I first spotted that you had nothing useful to say. Silly me for giving a person the benefit of the doubt.
For clarity, your first interaction with me was to accuse me of lying. I have twice asked you to leave me out of your fantasies. And yet, you’re still here telling me that I’ve done something dishonest by looking at the FSF and having an opinion. I’ve been polite. I have not attacked you. You’ve been insulting and taken everything personally.
Stop projecting your immaturity onto me. Stop imagining that you’re going to win my approval or respect. Stop imagining that my insistence that you stop bothering me is an attempt to have a conversation with you. And above all, go away, as I’ve requested three times.
Look, if you want to claim that “linguistic purism” doesn’t mean “overly precise,” that’s your problem. If you want to support someone who “underestimates people’s feelings” (a.k.a. “a creep”), that’s your problem. If you want to believe that, any day now, a group that has fallen on its face for decades will finally work out its issues, that’s your problem. As I’ve asked, please stop trying to make it my problem. You’ve made your point that you’re a true believer, now walk away, because you’re only going to convince me that you’re a terrible person, from here.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I actually summarized a section of the hilariously reactionary open letter in support of Stallman.
He is usually more focused on the philosophical underpinnings, and pursuing the objective truth and linguistic purism, while underemphasising people’s feelings on matters he’s commenting on. This makes his arguments vulnerable to misunderstanding and misrepresentation…
People genuinely signed onto “objective truth” and “linguistic purism” making him “vulnerable to misunderstanding.” If strawmen happen to stand among his most vocal supporters, that’s not remotely my problem.
But no, “there’s an AGPL that you can hunt for, and maybe someday they’ll have an opinion on machine learning” isn’t a counter-argument, to me. Those make my point for me, that they’ve never really cared about anything until it was far too late. I’m not going to tell you not to support them, but I’ll thank you for not telling me that I’m wrong for using their behavior and that of their supporters to assess them.
It’s not just the personalities, annoyingly. Even if supporters didn’t need to support Stallman with absurd statements like “he’s just too precise with his words for you to understand him,” the FSF still spent the '90s loudly dismissing people asking straightforward questions about what would happen if someone put GPL’d software onto an appliance or behind a web server. They mostly ignore anything that isn’t code. They’ve never looked at the future or how to convince people of their message. So, while I’ve donated to them in the past, I don’t really see them as relevant anymore. Putting Stallman back on the board with their “we miss him” press release also made it clear that they don’t see themselves as much more than his personal entourage, which even if he were the nicest, most progressive person in the world, would disqualify them as useful.
Is the Conservancy a replacement? I don’t know, because I don’t know if I can see their missions as overlapping enough to do so. It’s been a decade since Kuhn (not to pick on him) has so much as mentioned Copyleft-Next, for example, and that repository hasn’t budged in seven years.
Honestly, what I think that I’d really like to see is more of a grass-roots organization, where we’re not constantly waiting for “leaders” to show up. Especially since software has largely shifted to (on the ground) management through distributed systems and issue-tracking, it seems silly to keep imagining the Free Software movement as centralized.
Sure, we could point to thousands of years of really smart people trying and utterly failing to build mathematical models for innovation and thought, but it also does make a certain amount of sense that, if you pile up enough transistors and wish really hard, that your investment will Frosty the Snowman itself into being your friend, right…?
In addition to YaCy and the varieties of Searx (both of which perform better for me than any of the commercial search engines), it’s not even out of the question to do this yourself, if you’re willing to start with the most recent Common Crawl dump and do some spidering in between releases. I don’t recommend it, unless you want to learn for yourself why search engines often give such miserable results, but it’s possible.
However, that’s the issue, here. Can you self-host a search engine? Sure, if you want to maintain the storage to back it. That depends on how deep your pockets go…
Probably, though I don’t know their architecture well enough to say. The discussion that I saw referred specifically to PDF.js, which I believe is what the browsers use, though.
It’s not as clean a solution as they’d like it to be, but for another option, Jellyfin hosts media including books. When I say “not as clean,” I mean that you can stream video and music from the server, but it has you download books to read on another device. Last I heard, they were looking to integrate at least a PDF viewer into the interface, though.
I’d say to ignore the platform licensing and just make sure that the license appears in the media itself (which it should, anyway, in case anybody finds it randomly) and marked in descriptions.
YouTube seems interesting, because there’s so much garbage listed as CC-BY that almost certainly doesn’t have any legitimate permission for it, and I’ve never found actual Creative Commons content through that route, so that probably informs my “just ignore it” thinking…