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Co-founder of Twitter joins new Mastodon board of directors. Right, so federating with Threads wasn’t a mistake. This is just the direction Mastodon is going. Oh, well. Another Mozilla emerges.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/04/mastodon-forms-new-u.s.-non-profit/
@aral Mastodon has a board of directors? How?
@RosePuckey They created a new US not-for-profit. Let’s see if it becomes a Mozilla-like not-for-profit that owns a for-profit next.
@aral @RosePuckey Your earlier declarative statement that "another Mozilla emerges" makes it hard to believe you've done anything but make up your mind already.
buff dog himbo@MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey christ have people never heard of things like "pattern recognition," "history repeating itself," or just the completely reasonable act of "making predictions based on real-world events"???
The overall trend with the FOSS world lately has fucking sucked. Org after org is gradually falling into the same predatory, money-grubbing, privacy-invading, user-exploiting bullshit the big companies do. Supposedly "for survival." People are rational to be sick of it.
@MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey there are ZERO REASONS to give any tech company the benefit of the doubt in the current climate. Every sus move a FOSS org makes that looks like the same enshittification we've seen over the last 20 years has a crowd of breathless goobers saying "what makes you so SURE?? Nothing's happened YET!! It could be different, YOU'RE ruining everything with your CYNICISM!!"
How fucking gullible can you be? How many times do they have to do this before people get it?
@itsmeholland @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey I mean, this one might turn out different, but the best way to ensure is follows the same old path is to insist we wait and see. If we want it to go better, I think we have to hold them to a higher standard.
@williampietri @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey exactly. The only way things turn out different is when we stop letting our elitist overlords who control the means of production to proceed without resistance from the affected end users or developers. They clearly cannot be reliably left to their own devices, especially when vast sums of money & fame/infamy are at stake.
@itsmeholland @williampietri @aral @RosePuckey No. William said “let’s wait and see.” *You* did the same as Aral, saying in effect “everything sucks so let’s wait and see how unbelievably terrible things get.” Those are not the same and shouldn’t be presented in the language of general agreement.
@MisterMoo @itsmeholland I definitely did not say "let's wait and see". My point is the opposite.
@MisterMoo @williampietri @aral @RosePuckey I'll say again: we do not HAVE to "wait and see" because WE ALREADY HAVE with these ass clowns. They do not pass the sniff test no matter how optimistic you want to be. Gullible is the only word for it by now. It's not anyone else's problem that you can't smell what they're steppin in.
@MisterMoo @williampietri @aral @RosePuckey & Eugen's garbage attitude about it isn't really helping honestly. "You just don't know the truth of it (like i do). These guys aren't who you THINK they are. They're cool & have good intentions, not bad ones, they told me so!" Ah yes, special insights that only one special boy can comprehend somehow, in spite of the histories of the people he's surrounding himself with. Any complaints we could possibly have are because we are all simply dumdums.
@itsmeholland @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey I would flip it around, our blind trust has seen social networks being destroyed regularly for decades. That's why I am so interested in self-hosting projects now. It's fun to learn, and gives me more control over my data. Eyeem was a great idea, but it was sold and now all photos are being used to train AI, so the users have been abused. Enshitification is familiar to French speakers, "emmerdant". ;-)
@itsmeholland @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey
To say that history is repeating itself, we'd have to have the stage where the FOSS org gets "big enough" to matter and has accumulated enough value for the investors to try to extract something out of it.
Mastodon has not had any of it. The CEO's salary is so low that he could be making more money by doing food delivery.
@itsmeholland @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey
If we want FOSS to be more than a niche thing (I know I do...) we need to learn how to grow it, fund it and make it valuable. This means that, yes, we will also have to give up on this BS purity ideology test. Plenty of people who would be willing to take a paycut to work on something meaningful, but no one serious should be martyring themselves because over a handful crying about their hatred of Big Tech but not ponying up the resources to fight it.
@raphael @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey if you give up on the ideological reasons why people even like FOSS, then it's literally not FOSS at some point lmao. I personally don't care if FOSS grows if growing means ceasing to be useful, privacy-respecting, or user-oriented.
& you're right, FOSS projects don't get big enough to follow the exact same pattern.... because big companies literally kill or absorb them first. That's why they HAVE to be ideologically robust, so they fucking survive at all.
@raphael @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey literally I'm so fucking tired of being told that if I want x thing to become "mainstream" or "not a niche" or "more than just a subculture," I have to give up on expecting anything at all. I don't have high expectations, but apparently the fact that I have ANY expectations is a problem lmao. It's always this way when people want to convince me that growth is so necessary that we have to become or collaborate with our enemies or else fail. I'll take failure.
@raphael @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey I'm not fucking kidding, I'm so exhausted from seeing everything i fucking love get assimilated & enshittified with the justification of "preserving it" that by now I'm ALWAYS more willing to burn down anything I love than help the process of enshittifying it for its "survival" (as a worse & less useful version of its former self). I'm tired of hearing everything has to suck to persist. I'm DONE. Do not engage me further if this is your line of reasoning.
@raphael @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey Also, Eugen is making 60k Euros. I've actually done food delivery & it's not that LMAO. 
@itsmeholland @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey
- I really don't get how FOSS can get "assimilated". Every project that tried a bait-and-switch ends up forked.
- If you want a purely FOSS computer (and support it however possible) you can keep it "small". A social media network is only valuable if I can use to talk with everyone, not just some niche subculture that happens to "love" it.
- Eugen gave himself a raise? Great. Still makes less than an intern at any tech company.
@raphael @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey Canonical went fucky for a couple reasons, not playing very nice with the general FOSS scene & taking a walled garden approach, complete with Amazon ads in their desktop searches.
Red Hat went status quo & closed their source, offering only a paid subscription based access option.
Mozilla is a hot mess. Gnome is too cozy with Google for many people's tastes & conferences & orgs still prioritize Google products rather than prioritizing open alternatives.
@itsmeholland @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey
All the examples you are throwing serve to illustrate the point that people working on FOSS (like everyone else) need to make money, and unless the "community" gets to value their work they will find someone who does.
60k€/year is *nothing* for someone with Eugen's skills. Expecting him to keep working for such a low salary and receive nothing but abuse clearly does not get him close to your cause.
@raphael @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey Lol no they aren't but whatever you have to believe to not go insane I guess. 
also your solution of "well just fork if you don't like it" is literally saying "do work for free to preserve nice things because better people than you deserve to make money at the expense of the quality of the thing they work on."
We have had nice things in life before everything always had to go to shit because "we live in a society," so I'm not interested in this argument.
@raphael @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey so like, clearly this is an ongoing problem without a clear solution at the moment, but I don't accept "the product/service must get shitty so that some ppl can get a meaty salary bc if not, the product dies (but it will die even if they get paid bc that will always mean fucking it so it no longer serves users eventually, so you'll have to maintain it entirely yourself for free anyway, sorry you lose no matter what but at least someone makes money this way)"
> the product/service must get shitty so that some ppl can get a meaty salary
Not my point. My argument from the beginning was (1) you were assuming Mastodon will go to shit because they are trying to grow beyond a mere niche system and (2) the "community" doesn't do enough to support *even* when they are small and that *any* attempt at find a sustainable model is attacked as "selling out" and "enshittified".
Everything else you argue has been strawmen, so let's leave it that.
@raphael this is exhausting. Bye.
@raphael @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey & that's not to even mention the stupid as fuck AI craze that even DuckDuckGo is dabbling in now. Just because you haven't noticed the slow creep of enshittification & Google/Meta/Amazon influence in the FOSS world doesn't mean it's not happening lmfao. 
@raphael @MisterMoo @aral @RosePuckey Oh, and did I mention how Google & Apple literally buy up new companies regularly for the purpose of destroying them? I'm sure at least some started as FOSS. There are literally too many to count. Just... use some imagination please, because I 1000% guarantee Meta & Twitter are already working hard to make the fediverse hackable for their own benefit. Just because you don't want to imagine it's possible doesn't mean it isn't.