Would the “Extreme Centre” featured in The Social Dilemma be prevented from radicalising people if greater regulation was in place? Of course not, they should have used FOSS to get their message out!
…I’m being facetious, but honestly, FOSS-or-not is orthogonal to the issues set out in the documentary. The fact that most FOSS social networking doesn’t have ads has nothing to do with the source code being available under a particular licence. It happens because it’s run by idealistic volunteers who will use money they obtained elsewhere to promote both FOSS and services without ads, because they like both things. An AGPL social network could use exactly the same manipulations to fund itself and it would still be free software provided they shared the code.
The actual alternative was stated very clearly in the documentary - you have to pay, or else you are the product. There is a narrow window that exists in the small FOSS communities now where that isn’t true, but if you want to see an alternative that works at scale you’d better be ready to subscribe to that patreon or your providers are not going to make it. As usual, it’s about $.
It depends if you are thinking about corporate open source or ethical open-source. I do think that free software is avoiding those kind of issues. I especially think federalization is a great thing. I don’t think it would be any viable to get ads on lemmy or on mastodon. People would just switch to another instance ad-free.
Would the “Extreme Centre” featured in The Social Dilemma be prevented from radicalising people if greater regulation was in place? Of course not, they should have used FOSS to get their message out!
…I’m being facetious, but honestly, FOSS-or-not is orthogonal to the issues set out in the documentary. The fact that most FOSS social networking doesn’t have ads has nothing to do with the source code being available under a particular licence. It happens because it’s run by idealistic volunteers who will use money they obtained elsewhere to promote both FOSS and services without ads, because they like both things. An AGPL social network could use exactly the same manipulations to fund itself and it would still be free software provided they shared the code.
The actual alternative was stated very clearly in the documentary - you have to pay, or else you are the product. There is a narrow window that exists in the small FOSS communities now where that isn’t true, but if you want to see an alternative that works at scale you’d better be ready to subscribe to that patreon or your providers are not going to make it. As usual, it’s about $.
It depends if you are thinking about corporate open source or ethical open-source. I do think that free software is avoiding those kind of issues. I especially think federalization is a great thing. I don’t think it would be any viable to get ads on lemmy or on mastodon. People would just switch to another instance ad-free.