The unavoidable fact is that supporting nice nimble native APIs for every OS is more work than targeting electron. The best thing any individual can do is help with that work - support software that compiles to native APIs, e.g. if you Matrix consider using/contributing to nheko instead of Element.

Bold move criticising the CCP on Lemmy. Closed source software = evil, forced labour camps = autonomy

This whole thread is a brilliant demonstration of the FOSS/privacy activist condition. Anyone who successfully scales an actual private service will be attacked and abandoned so that the activists can show off how uncompromising they are and say “contact me on <software you don’t use>” so they can seem aloof and cool on social media.

I was surprised that Matrix made it onto the list in this post. It’s already making inroads on the mainstream and the deranged hit pieces began a while ago (none linked in this thread yet). I give it another few years at most before the whinger crowd are treating it with the same disdain as Discord just because it built the features needed to retain XX million users.

Yes though it’s not really a symmetrical comparison. Let me make an analogy: suppose for transport I’ve been using a public diesel bus and I’m growing upset about the environmental impact of this vehicle. Instead I buy an ebike which is exclusively for my own use.

When I do this the bus is still operating. For some people an ebike is never going to be an acceptable substitute. There are many reasons including age/physical ability, baggage or distance requirements, or a need to travel during bad weather. By not taking the bus, all I’ve saved is the extra diesel that was burnt due to my body’s mass being aboard the vehicle, a small contribution to the overall system.

If my own traffic is very low - let’s take it to an extreme and say I travel only a short distance once per month - then in terms of carbon emissions it would have been better to burn slightly more diesel than to have my own ebike. As my level of use increases, at some point it becomes more environmentally friendly to have the ebike.

Scalability isn’t a completely linear thing - when you are meeting a lot of people’s requirements simultaneously you end up with resources which are going to be committed anyway, which gives savvy users the ability to “freeload” on incremental costs only.

I wonder how much traffic you have to get for the manufacturing and shipping costs of a battery, solar panel, own server, etc. to outweigh the carbon footprint of adding a small incremental load to a shared hosting provider which resides in a conventional datacenter?

He is a capitalist applying capitalist solutions to problems. You don’t have to like capitalists but for all its flaws the system does function, and taking a profit is table stakes. The consumer who opts in to his way of doing things gets a car with a reduced dependency on fossil fuels, advanced safety features, and some level of self-driving capabilities. On the flip side they are deeply proprietary, in constant communication with the mothership and very expensive. For everyone else, Tesla is pushing the industry along so we will get more EVs to choose from sooner than we might otherwise have done. Can you really say his activities are anti-consumer? I don’t think so - it’s just that you and I are not his target consumer.

The real damage of Facebook is their monopoly created through network effects. I am not anticipating a monopoly on electric cars or internet access any time soon.

Yes, it’s fair to say he’s kind of a dick but it’s not the full story. His goals for electric vehicles and universal internet access are noble ones. Wanting to put people on Mars seems like a waste of time to me, but so are most human pursuits and this one’s at least interesting. His use of social media is juvenile. His attempt to help the kids trapped in the cave was ham-fisted attention-seeking. I don’t give a toss if he smokes weed, that’s not my business.

I’m not going to try to put him on a single-axis scale of good/bad. Doing so is a popular hobby among those who wish to have endless arguments with the “other” on social media. The guy’s useful for some things but not others.

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 $.