How does one not feel safe on a digital platform? Even if someone physically threatens you, nothing is going to happen to you. And you can block/mute people you don’t care for.
Digital platforms have promoted genocide. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa16/5933/2022/en/ Blocking people you don’t care for would have no impact here.
Leaving the platform would have no impact either. You are talking about something different.
The “safety” thing is a bit hyperbolic. I wish they’d just say “the quality of the interactions is going down” or “poor moderation” or something else a little more honest.
Twitter is a shitty platform in structure, format, and moderation. I’m glad Debian’s not on it. But I am disappointed in them for using hyperbolic rhetoric.
Safe is a very broad term. Its not being used hyperbolically here. It’s not referring to physical safety.
Yeah I’m aware that it means “emotional safey” the way they’re using it. But they’re still being hyperbolic, because emotional safety in the context of opinions on the Internet is just not meaningful. In a relationship one can speak of emotional safety in context of emotional manipulation or violence, but on a microblogging platform? The axiom of Tyler the Creator still applies, and we’re not even talking about targeted harassment.
What is “The Axiom of Tyler the Creator”?
Maybe we’ll go back to forums.
I hope BBS’s make a comeback. Pixilated titles and all…
I’ve been working on writing my own forum in C# lately. Meant to look like some places I went on back in 2009-ish
I mean, have you seen YetAnotherForum.net? .Net Core, PostgreSQL/MySQL Support and the old VBulletin styling from the hayday of internet forums.
Fucking awesome
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.
It actually is a perfectly sensible move, and it doesn’t “shut out” anyone. If anything, prioritizing twitter is what shuts users out. They linked to two-three alternatives. What’s the argument here, exactly, from the other side?
I think the argument is that those alternatives already existed before. Twitter was not being prioritized, it was essentially mirroring the content already available in RSS, mastodon, etc. So effectively, there’s now one less place where the news will be visible.
However, I do agree with the move, but only because Debian being a FOSS initiative should stay away from proprietary platforms and promote FOSS, even if it means effectively “shutting off” a portion of users who don’t wanna leave the twitter bubble.
When it forces you to log in to view stuff, it’s usefulness as a platform for announcements is substantially lessened.
I’d even say, the usefullness is fully gone.
Debian: the OG. The boss. The king.
I didn’t really need another reason to love Debian more but here we are… I’m donating to Debian today
Debian continues to be one of the best distros ever made. If I had the means, it would get funding every time I run apt update.
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"
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.
Last time they seeked input they ignored it and shoved systemd anyway…
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.
The other twist is, unlike Xitter, you don’t have to create an account on Mastodon to be able to read their feed. You can access it like any other website. So nobody is getting shut out. They’re just posting elsewhere, where anyone can read it.
You don’t even have to go to the website. Every Mastodon feed can be accessed via RSS. You just have to add “.rss” to the end of the URL.
That’s a super neat trick actually. Why the heck has RSS been losing popularity when it seems to be the only magic protocol you really need to keep up with what you actually care about?
Oh I just answered my own question: It must be harder to hijack RSS with intrusive ads and clickbait…
Find the RSS viewer in Chrome or Firefox 😉
Ohhh I see what you did there. They’re all extensions. So 98% of users doesn’t even know it’s a possibility if it’s not default lol.
Blah.
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
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
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
First it is reinventing the wheel, xmpp exists for a very long time, second there are only a few server implementations, third the resource consumption of them is so high that you can’t really run it reliably on a raspberry pi for your family
Point taken (Although I don’t see any issues with re-inventing the wheel), I really wished XMPP had riddiculously good bridging capabilities
Then XMPP Would be perfect
Have a look at https://codeberg.org/slidge
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.
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.
go back to forums. Support in discord is awful. Discord is not as searchable as a forum public on the internet
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?
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.
Thank you! This has always been my main gripe about “collaboration platforms” in general (Discord, Slack, Teams, WebEx, etc). It’s just chat with extra steps, and does not make important information any easier to find.
Oh my gods, the mess that is Teams. When I first started working at my current company I was kind of excited because all of the software just works together. It felt novel, and I was enchanted by it. That quickly died when I realised that it makes finding anything a nightmare. There’s a billion different tabs and solutions for every single individual thing, and even multiple things within the same project. I think the main project I work on has like fifteen different test documents, and good luck trying to find the documentation for pushing stuff live! The only real way to find things is to ask someone who knows. There’s half a billion different search bars and finding the right one is just way too time consuming.
That’s what happens when people don’t know how to use the system properly. They just throw their files and announcements into random places without any thought, and expect everyone to be able to find them.
In cases like that, you just need to ask a more experienced user for direction, because nothing else works. It’s not your fault you can’t find your way around a labyrinth like this. It’s the fault of everyone who turned that place into a labyrinth.
Can we also blame the software? Maybe, if the marketing was misreading. Mostly though, this sort of mess emerges as a result of ignorant people abusing the system.
The “searchification” of fucking everything is driving me absolutely insane! No, I don’t want a search bar to be the only way to find things, and hiding the actual file functions does nobody any favors. Having a big prominent search bar in your product only tells me that you’re actively scraping my data to sell to advertisers.
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.
Maybe for the Discord use-case of joining mass-community servers it simply doesn’t have the network-effect yet. I haven’t used it much myself sadly! But I imagine a lot of users had the same idea you did: “Let’s make a server! Aw nobody’s here.”
But I think adoption would grow if we started using it for what a LOT of people use Discord for currently: The micro-server for get-togethers of smaller social circles.
- Voice chat for videogames
- Small digital meet-ups, like artists, churches, clubs, etc.
- Distance-playing tabletop RPGs.
- College study groups.
That’s where adoption starts and snowballs. Unfortunately, I believe the VC-funded data-mining corpo-apps will always have the advantage in scooping up the “I want to join a crowded mass community room” users.
But that’s okay for a start.
The way I see it, we need to be most concerned with keeping our security and privacy amongst our closest associates, and occasionally we’ll need to venture out into the “commercial-net” with our hoodies up and sunglasses on to interact with the crowd, fully aware there’s surveillance everywhere.
The problem is always trying to get people to move from one platform to another. They are invested in discord, many people quite literally with nitro. So in the interim I wanted to join other communities and poke around and get the lay of the land. Basically come at it from two angles
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?
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
Good job Debian.
Good for them. It’s an organisation’s free choice to pick the platforms they post and interact on, if any. Their presence is a service in itself while there are plenty of other ways to follow or reach them if needed.
Ship ship ship!
