Latest #FOSSAcademic post: Researching the fediverse from the perspective of individual or instances. In which I draw on an article Christina Dunbar-Hester to talk about researchers' perspectives on the #fediverse, including my own.
https://fossacademic.tech/2024/03/14/Instances-and-Individuals.html
[replies to this post will appear as comments on my blog, unless set to followers-only or more private. CWs will work]
@rwg good post, I like the fact that you explicitly state creating an instance is a political act.
But then I tend to think that we encode our politics when we design and code our applications.
I know techies don't always like to acknowledge the fact that politics is a factor in what we do online and who we choose to associate with.
@onepict Yeah. I remember being a bit shocked years ago when I asked a FOSS developer about their politics and how they embed them in their tech. They said: it's not political, it's neutral. People can use it for any purpose.
It was my first time hearing a "freedom 0" answer to the politics of technology. I have trouble understanding this view to this day.
@rwg @onepict I really want an open source movement that throws out the FSF, OSI, and their collective freedom 0-loving butts on the street. It should be okay to say no to having your free work lifted by a global monopoly. It should be okay to decide your software shouldn't be usable for unethical things.
@ocdtrekkie
The BSDs haven't given us techies the options we have today, GNU/FSF proactively have (not sure what OSI/Apache have done other than herding projects). Of course, rich people capitalize on it more than other people, like with everything else.
And it wasn't that long ago that "mechanism, not policy" was a thing, it kept software "inclusive". Muddling it up (bake in policy, all it an app) serves no purpose; if only software projects hadn't done it.
@rwg @onepict
@ocdtrekkie
Why wouldn't global monopolies and unethical people "pirate" your ethically-licensed software?
@rwg @onepict
