Even people with the most to lose continue to support and rely heavily on:
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Even people with the most to lose continue to support and rely heavily on:
-- Google
-- Slack
-- Meta
-- Microsoft
-- Apple
-- Too many others to listThese orgs cozy up to authoritarianism. They terminate your account for any reason or no reaso at all. They shove AI down your throat.
And yet, my workplace, union, and so many of the orgs I value and need keep using them and have no plans to ween themselves off. Yes, I realize current dynamics make all of this inevitable.
So I'm left feeling hopeless and helpless, which is a terrible place to be.
@dangoodin I totally feel you. I have been a platform refusenik for many years and have found that people often take a depressingly compliant, conformist attitude towards all their technology decisions. They just do the most popular thing and feel that somebody else should be responsible for the consequences.
But strangely, after a few years of being the annoying guy at a party calling CEOs fascists (not a good tactic), followed by many years of being more "oh no sorry I'm not on FasciTalk. Here's my phone number/email." Things changed.
Now, sooo many people are starting to understand and take an interest in having more independent infrastructure. So I'm actually more optimistic than I've been since like 2007.
That said, I do find that you can't really convince anyone of anything. They have to come to their own conclusions on their own terms. But you can be supportive of people when they do, especially in helping them understand that FOSS solutions may be quite different from glossy corporate stuff and require community care and janitorial work.
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@thomasareed @dangoodin I don't think most people could install Windoze either. It's just that it's forced upon everyone when they purchase a new machine and buy peer pressure.
Fair, but that doesn't change the fact that moving to decentralized platforms adds more friction than non-technologists can tolerate.
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The privacy of sensitive union discussions is most def a battle worth picking.
@dangoodin @rk I keep bubbling this conversation up in my union. There is just so much inertia!
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Agreed. But no one seems to be doing that sucessfully, with maybe the exception of Signal and maybe Mastodon. Yes, others are trying but the usability is often lacking and the security is untested.
@dangoodin @markhurst -- maybe users could systematically keep their eyes on software, and encourage independent devs trying to make great software for them. i've been working nonstop forever, and it's impossible to get people even take a look at new stuff.
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Not to mention the non-trivial amount of work required. With Slack, you can register and account and host hundreds of people in 5 minutes. None of the Slack alternatives are that easy.
@dangoodin I’ve heard good things about Zulip as a Slack alternative and the signup for their cloud offering is just as easy.
They’re in the US but not “big tech”, and it’s open-source with free self-hosting if you prefer that or want to switch to it down the road. The only charges for self-hosting are for mobile notifications (since that requires their servers) and support contracts.
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And these unions aren't using any of the platforms listed in my OP? Impressive if so.
@dangoodin it's a misunderstanding: I was saying they have the capacity to write a plan and get off big tech.
not that they're actually doing it! 🙃
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@dangoodin @markhurst -- maybe users could systematically keep their eyes on software, and encourage independent devs trying to make great software for them. i've been working nonstop forever, and it's impossible to get people even take a look at new stuff.
Remember when the hype was that social media promised better awareness, connectivity, and propagation of ideas and innovation? It’s had the opposite effect. It’s now just like conservative media: the noise blots out almost all of the signal.
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@thomasareed @dangoodin I've had pretty good success doing this. Mint feels very like windows to the people I've helped. And most people are uncomfortable with Word etc. anyway, so Libreoffice is not too tough.
The rub is with people who must use some MS-only program for work or school. Or to connect with work or school. That's a deal breaker.
@MarvinFreeman @thomasareed @dangoodin Linux is much much easier than it was just a few years ago. It's also still not good enough for the supermajority of users.
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Even people with the most to lose continue to support and rely heavily on:
-- Google
-- Slack
-- Meta
-- Microsoft
-- Apple
-- Too many others to listThese orgs cozy up to authoritarianism. They terminate your account for any reason or no reaso at all. They shove AI down your throat.
And yet, my workplace, union, and so many of the orgs I value and need keep using them and have no plans to ween themselves off. Yes, I realize current dynamics make all of this inevitable.
So I'm left feeling hopeless and helpless, which is a terrible place to be.
@dangoodin Google and Apple are going to be the toughest ones to wean off of, for all of us. As an individual the alternative phones are, well, pretty dire and the OSes are Android-based anyway. As an org it’s hard to escape the vacuum pull of their app stores - in part due to the anticompetitive antics they’ve been allowed to get away with for so long.
I’m right there with you on the lost and hopeless front.
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@MarvinFreeman @thomasareed @dangoodin Linux is much much easier than it was just a few years ago. It's also still not good enough for the supermajority of users.
@mweiss @thomasareed @dangoodin Well, opinions and experience differ.
I've noticed the windows users frequently say things like "Why isn't it doing what I want?" They've grown accustomed to their computers baffling them.
My spouse, mother, and employees in my office found the transition to mint pretty easy. The standard gnome desktop would be tough though.
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@dangoodin I love how Linux is always the solution. Folks have no clue how regular people operate. If I were to hand a Linux laptop to any of the smart but non-technical folks I know, they’d struggle hard. Expecting them to install Linux or install and manage a number of FOSS tools? That’s not happening.
@thomasareed @dangoodin I have a vague hope that Valve might popularise Linux with a subsection of gamers via all the work they are putting into the Steam Machine and their Linux based SteamOS. That may start some sort of snowball. Or possibly not.
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I appreciate everyone who has taken time to respond. Unfortunately, some of the responses demonstrate how much many of us privacy-minded technologists live in ivory towers and have no idea how hard it is to get the rest of the world to take on the added friction of switching.
There's a real challenge when most of your external emails are passing through Google or Microsoft anyway, and when your social circle just stares blankly when you suggest Signals over WhatsApp. Critical mass takes a lot of force to overcome all that inertia.
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@thomasareed @dangoodin I have a vague hope that Valve might popularise Linux with a subsection of gamers via all the work they are putting into the Steam Machine and their Linux based SteamOS. That may start some sort of snowball. Or possibly not.
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@thomasareed @dangoodin I don't think most people could install Windoze either. It's just that it's forced upon everyone when they purchase a new machine and buy peer pressure.
@mikecox @dangoodin That’s probably true, but it’s also irrelevant. The vast majority of people will never have to learn how to install Windows, while all of them would have to either figure out how to install Linux or find someone to do it for them if they decided to try Linux.
However, all of them would need to figure out how to install other apps, connect hardware peripherals like mice, monitors, printers, microphones, speakers, etc, and that’s where the Linux + FOSS experiment would come to an end for most of them.
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@thomasareed @dangoodin I have a vague hope that Valve might popularise Linux with a subsection of gamers via all the work they are putting into the Steam Machine and their Linux based SteamOS. That may start some sort of snowball. Or possibly not.
@bjn @dangoodin That is the one thing I can see that has the potential to bring Linux to a wider audience.
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@dangoodin Yeah. I mean, they’re not wrong… it’s hard to trust Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc these days. But there’s a good reason that it has never yet been “the year of Linux on the desktop.” I myself - a technical person - have irrevocably borked Linux installs to the point that the only option was to erase and start over, just by trying to install a piece of open source software on it.
@thomasareed @dangoodin Chromebook is a Linux. It’s not hard to just install everything like on Linux Mint or a Ubuntu Desktop. No one is asking to install Slackware for non tech folks or Gentoo. I did this for a lot of “old” but perfectly working Windows laptops at a volunteer run Sunday school and the users have no issues. They open a Google Chrome and go about their day.
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@mweiss @thomasareed @dangoodin Well, opinions and experience differ.
I've noticed the windows users frequently say things like "Why isn't it doing what I want?" They've grown accustomed to their computers baffling them.
My spouse, mother, and employees in my office found the transition to mint pretty easy. The standard gnome desktop would be tough though.
@MarvinFreeman @thomasareed @dangoodin Windows has gotten worse in recent years. That doesn't make it harder than Linux overall.
Once everything is working, Linux Mint is roughly as easy as Windows as a daily driver. But when things aren't working, Linux (even Mint) gets much harder much more quickly.
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Even people with the most to lose continue to support and rely heavily on:
-- Google
-- Slack
-- Meta
-- Microsoft
-- Apple
-- Too many others to listThese orgs cozy up to authoritarianism. They terminate your account for any reason or no reaso at all. They shove AI down your throat.
And yet, my workplace, union, and so many of the orgs I value and need keep using them and have no plans to ween themselves off. Yes, I realize current dynamics make all of this inevitable.
So I'm left feeling hopeless and helpless, which is a terrible place to be.
@dangoodin Those types of orgs should really invest in their own NextCloud server or something
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@thomasareed @dangoodin I have a vague hope that Valve might popularise Linux with a subsection of gamers via all the work they are putting into the Steam Machine and their Linux based SteamOS. That may start some sort of snowball. Or possibly not.
@thomasareed @dangoodin Commoditise your complements as they say in Business School 101. For Valve, one of the main complements to their software is the operating system. So they have an incentive to capitalise on the work already done to create Linux and turn it into a lower cost (ie: free) alternative to Windows for normal humans. I have trouble thinking of anyone else who has that incentive.
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Even people with the most to lose continue to support and rely heavily on:
-- Google
-- Slack
-- Meta
-- Microsoft
-- Apple
-- Too many others to listThese orgs cozy up to authoritarianism. They terminate your account for any reason or no reaso at all. They shove AI down your throat.
And yet, my workplace, union, and so many of the orgs I value and need keep using them and have no plans to ween themselves off. Yes, I realize current dynamics make all of this inevitable.
So I'm left feeling hopeless and helpless, which is a terrible place to be.
@dangoodin I'm slowly working towards not depending on any of them. But here's catch-22 that I'm yet to find a good solution for:
Your email domain.
Are there any trustworthy domain registrars that don't require you to have a valid email address in order to acquire and manage a new domain?
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@informapirata@www.informapirata.it
Grazie ho letto la prima parte, spiegazione molto interessante, mi sono venuti dei dubbi, magari mi si chiariranno leggendo il resto.
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