I hope this won’t lead to a crisis of (Mc)Governance.

I think Mastodon deserves a special mention, simply because I feel it has a comparably big userbase compared to most alternative networks and it’s a well working twitter alternative with some genuine improvements over the “original” thing.

Seems pretty cool, but not what I would have expected from the term “community wealth sharing platform”.

Because to claim that real world systems come even close to being a meritocracy is an illusion. You can’t fix systemic inequalities and discrimination without, well, addressing them.

This could bring an influx of new users to Linux, which would be a boost for the open source operating system, though it’s likely that any distro the Chinese government uses would be heavily modified and restricted.

On paper, this could be good news for Linux. However, any OS the Chinese government uses will likely be heavily regulated and censored, which is contrary to what the Linux and open source communities stand for.

Seems like the tangible benefits for the linux and open source community expected from that might be somewhat limited. Maybe some gov workers will switch to linux privately and maybe the gov might end up funding some projects, but they probably won’t contribute to the open source community directly.

I think gatekeeping like yours hurts the community significantly more.

That’s my understanding. You can decrease it, significantly, but not entirely. But the same goes for the web in general. Hard to completely bock all tracking and such too while still interacting meaningfully. So unless you’re a die-hard fanatic and willing to suffer a lot of inconveniences, good enough will have to be, well, good enough for most of us.

Depends on what you consider “enough”. Even “degoogling” it in most instances won’t entirely get rid of proprietary code and reliance on some google services. It’s a trade-off.

I’d say the most private would probably a Purism Librem with Pinephone being second place. Both of those come with their own caveats.

I think Graphene also puts a high focus on security for which, if you’re using android, the Pixel phones offer the best platform. You could also go with the /e/ android operating system if your focus is on de-googling while sticking to android.

but overall it’s a dangerous trend that makes people at large less able to think for theirselves

How does censoring misinformation contribute to people being less able to think for themselves in your opinion? The whole schtick of most anti-vaxx content is throwing pseudo-scientific jargon or misleading partial information at you, so you can have your personal opinion validated in a way that SEEMS smart. None of it holds up to scrutiny and it’s just a way of enabling people’s worst impulses instead of actually fostering critical thinking.

I agree that education, setting the record straight and argumentatively dismantling false information is preferable and more likely to foster structural thinking than just deleting it. But that’s a loosing battle because spouting misinformation is by its nature way easier than dismantling it. Education is better than deletion, but deletion might still be better than not doing anything.

As opposed to not encrypting which also makes you a target for a significantly bigger amount of people with less required skills?

Other than that, I think the strength of federated services lies in their diversity and due to the open source, federated nature of most services, anyone is free to create their own apps/instances with unique designs anyways, so that seems like a losing battle from the get go.

I don’t understand what the benefit of that is supposed to be. You could argue that it might make it easier for users to navigate the platforms. But if a user is getting confused that seems more of an UI than design issue and different platforms will naturally have different needs in that regard anyways.