Been playing some Xonotic recently. Good times with FOSS.

I learned that just now.

Elon Musk

Can someone explain to me the difference between bluesky and twitter?

This made me look up the wikipedia page on Bushism and I must say it’s beautiful! Thanks :)

This is wonderful, I’ve been struggling with piped for some time now, it’s always asking me to sign in to confirm that I’m not a bot. Also it’s showing me videos in very low quality and often it stops loading halfway through the video. With this I get to see good quality videos once more, without unwanted pauses and without financing yt in any way. Great!

But ads are not functioning, they are destructive. They are by no means cheap either, people are paying through being manipulated and we are paying collectively for the damage it’s doing to our world. We’d be much better of if we had only direct payments. Direct artist payments will always be the more effective and efficient financing structure because then we pay just for the creative output, not all the unrelated economic parasitic activities.

The solution is very simple and there is nothing that inflation can do about it: we don’t watch ads, we pay creators that we want to support, and if from these donations a creator doesn’t earn enough money he has two options: 1. One has an intrinsic drive to create and publish so he does so through other means, for instance by working a part time job. If this sounds unreasonable then let us not forget that already most of all human creativity is financed exactly like this, it is only the exception that is financially lucrative. 2. One chooses not to create (or in a less costly manner). You could think of this as a sad outcome, but you’d be better off concluding that this creative output wasn’t so important to anyone, not to the creator nor to the public. This means we’d be left with the better and more intrinsically motivated creative content.

So let’s not justify ads, but let’s reject them in the most radical ways we can.

Ads exist because people want to make money. So these bad actors go out and look for places where people like to spend their time, and they poison these places with their money-hungry practices. In the process they destroy the innocence of all these manifestations of human creativity, and manipulate people into buying shit they don’t actually need, effectively destroying the planet through overconsumption. That’s not even mentioning that ad-companies put us on a path towards a mass-surveillance society, just because big-data leads to more effective ads. I can’t help but see ads as a destructive force of evil in our world. I like human creativity in it’s many forms, and I’m all in favor of rewarding creators to a certain extent, but using ads seems to be the worst possible method of doing so.

(not intending to criticize your comments, just spreading the anti-ad gospel ;-)

What a great site, I’ll definitely be sharing it with some (naive) friends and colleagues :)

What people think when they haven’t heard of the Fediverse.

do we need to wait until they start acting in truly awful ways before we act on the fact that they control a majority of the market and are trying to increase their market dominance

No I was arguing for exactly the opposite. Let’s not wait, but aim for non-profit decentralized platforms.

I agree, sort of. People may be right to point out that it’s not only about a dominant position but also about abusing that market power to lock people in. Still I think our entire platform-economy is a little problematic. People want one-stop-shopping because it’s really convenient, and people tend to go to platforms where others already are. So most people stick with Steam, Spotify, Uber, Whatsapp, etc. I don’t think this has to be a problem, if indeed these platform are in a way neutral, free, not abusing their power. Sometimes these platforms already behave in responsible manner, but there really is no guarantee that this will stay that way. Everything with a dominant position can be enshittified, including Steam. What we need are FOSS decentralized platforms! Platforms where everyone comes together are so important, that they shouldn’t be left to for-profit companies, people should come together in public squares.

Slowly across the globe we move towards surveillance states, one country is further down the path than the other, but we all makes steps in the same directions. If public awareness won’t rise I don’t see us escaping this dystopian future. Still today many people argue ‘I have nothing to hide’ and don’t have any critical thought beyond this point. Are we doomed or am I being to negative?

Wikipedia is such a beauty and I’m so glad and grateful it exists. Surely it’s not perfect, but it’s so inspiring and hopeful to see a collective effort be so successful. I sometimes wonder, what new projects we’ve seen since that are equally inspiring. The Fediverse certainly is beautiful but it’s also still a little bit fringe. I personally really like MusicBrainz, but that started 24 years ago What new collective projects has the internet brought us in recent years? And what collective projects could the future bring us?

Off topic: I’d argue Love Exposure by Sion Sono is the best movie ever made.

How the hell am I supposed to know which parts of that picture contain bicycles?

We don’t want your shitty products :)

Most people who make art don’t make any money from it. Some make a little bit of money. A small number of people can afford a living just by making art, and just a fraction of that actually get most of the money that’s being earned by artists, and then of course there is a lot of money that’s being paid for art that never reaches the artist. The business as it is is not working very well for anyone except for some big media companies. The complete lack of commercial success hasn’t stopped a lot of artists, it won’t stop them in the future. Thank god, because it wouldn’t be the first time that after decades of no commercial success whatsoever such an outsider is discovered by the masses. Sure, lack of commercial success has stopped others, but that’s happening now just as it will happen without copyright laws. If donating to artists out of free will would be the norm, and people knew that that’s the main source of income for certain types of artists, then I’m sure a lot of people would do so. And aside from private donations there could be governments and all sorts of institutions financing art. And if someone still can’t make a living, then still none of that could legitimize copyright in my view. We should strive for a world where everyone that wants to follow up on their creative impulses has time and opportunity to do so, irrespective of their commercial success. But there should also be unrestricted access to knowledge, ideas, art, etc. Brilliant research, photography or music shouldn’t be reserved for those who can afford access. The public domain should be the norm so that our shared project of human creativity can reach maximum potential. Copyright seems to me to be a rather bizarre level of control over the freedom of others. It’s making something public for others to see, but then telling these people you’re not allowed to be inspired by it, you can’t take a free copy to show others, you can’t take the idea and do with it as you please. It’s severely limiting us culturally, it’s harming human creativity. And at the same time it’s hypocritical. Artistic ideas are often completely based of the ideas of others, everyone can see that the output is the result of a collective effort. The Beatles didn’t invent pop music, they just made some songs, precisely copying all that came before them, and then added a tiny bit of their own. And that’s not a criticism, that’s how human creativity functions. That’s what people should strive for. To limit copying, is to limit humanity in it’s core. Again, human creativity is very clearly a collective effort. But despite this fact, when someone gets successful suddenly it’s a personal achievement and they are allowed to ask for a lot of money for it. Well my answer is, yes they are allowed to ask, and I am very willing to pay, but they shouldn’t be allowed to go beyond asking, they shouldn’t be allowed to restrict access of something that has been published.

Yes, that would be best.

That’s right. They can put their art up for sale, but if someone wants to take a free copy nothing should be able to stop them.