Yah so Open Source projects, even GPL ones, need to have a non-profit foundation or Co-operative organization housed around them to be sustainable, if not eventually your favourite project will be sold off at some point in time when the project maintainer retires, gets bored, or wants to cash out.
I think we need to start socializing this more that Open Source != noble project you should support. Especially with the big tech companies embracing the concept and stripping the ideology behind it. The fact that Google doesn’t allow GPL code should be a red flag for anyone using BSD/Apache/MIT.
I have a love/hate relationship with Nextcloud for how bad they neglect personal users. They advertise as being an amazing cloud host solution for everyone but unless you use a partner provider you can’t get support as a personal user. Even the “gold” Nextcloud hosting providers will say they are powerless when it comes to fixing issues because they’re not paying for enterprise support licenses for their personal users. So we’re left with these long running issues (I have tickets that have been open since 2018 that are still not resolved) because Nextcloud GmbH has no incentive to fix.
Collabora built Libreoffice Online (C++) to have the software processing happen on the server side. OnlyOffice (HTML5) is built to have the processing on the client side in the browser. From a user perspective I don’t think it matters, but I believe most hosting/solution providers looking to offer a whitelabel office suite opt for OnlyOffice because it requires less server resources, as document processing is happening at the edge (the users computer, not the server.) I’m oversimplifying here but that’s the high level afaik.
“Also I do not like having to run Steam because I feel like that defeats the point of using free OS…”
You’re having a cognitive dissonance because of the dialectical nature of Linux’s goals with the reality of software in world society. You can’t think hyper rationally about linux. It has goals and a mission to provide a free software ecosystem but there are many things it offers that are proprietary. Think about this from a priority perspective: would you rather support a FOSS OS that aligns with your values and compromise by installing Steam and Lutris, or be a purist and say if it can’t all be free there’s no point at all and I will embrace the proprietary nature of Windows 10? This is the same folly that some ideologies fall into, they are not willing to make compromise because they feel it dirties the goal of their movement, so they participate in the existing world and just complain. Be pragmatic.
Sounds like you want HumHub.org with federation support
This seems like an overreaction for an opt-in addition on something they won’t be applying cross-tracking to. Software that scales to a larger audience can be improved via telemetry data collection. Probably more concern here around the recent acquisition and fear of commercialization. It’s good to be vigilant but not reactionary.
IMO social networks as they’re currently designed are bad enough for adults. We shouldn’t normalize them (too late I suppose). Ie. Your argument is similar to saying, “It’s disturbing to think of kids smoking, but a lot already are, so maybe having child cigarettes would be a bit safer for them.” I’m of the opinion that children under a certain age shouldn’t have access to social media at all, in the same way you can’t smoke or drink under a certain age until they are taught/understand it’s implications on their mental/physical health.
Having a social network for children is a pretty fucking terrible idea no matter how you look at it. I can’t think of a good reason why this would be beneficial to children that outweighs the risks (addiction, social isolation, exploitation, bullying, comparison). Like people should be up in arms about this idea.
I only know of the ones on the seafile partner site. Luckycloud is the least expensive. https://www.seafile.com/en/partner/
Check out Logseq, or Obsidian, or Zettlr. They all use markdown as their base meaning you can transfer your notes anywhere if you don’t like the development of the app in the future. They all can be hosted on a Seafile instance which is a really good Delta-sync app that has encryption. I use Luckycloud.de (seafile), which costs me 1 euro a month.
About Bellingcat being an arm of the CIA or that Proton supports Bellingcat or that Protonmail is run by Americans techbros that did some studies at CERN and decided to stay and leverage the Swiss brand? These are all relatively easy to google. For the Bellingcat CIA link search for GrayZone + Bellingcat. There’s some quality investigative journalism there.
I think the main issue is as cited by others, language. The other is that Facebook et al focus on countries with high GDP per capita. So poor countries aren’t really serviced well by American social media companies because there’s little profit to be made.
Mastodon seemed to be gaining some popularity in India for a time. It could be useful in other countries. Same with Lemmy, in the same way that LibreOffice has a large Global South adoption rate. Lemmy and Mastodon would need to focus on and promote localization though for that plan to succeed.
But we’re talking about why westerners get treated differently than the rest of the world really, and a lot of it has to do with US hegemony.
Not to detract from these guys because this is a dope release. But there’s a relatively new online collaborative open source one called PenPot that’s similar to Inkscape worth checking out too.