Beautifully put!

I'm all for disciplining the oligarchs and their goon squads. But competition can exist on many levels, maybe even including their own playing field? Sure it's a tilted field, but it's a flawed system, and it can be hacked.

There are not enough virtuous heroes in the market. The good have ceded the field. Just like in politics. Everyone wants to shout and boo from the sidelines.

A friend who was an MPP for a while has talked about the tripod that it takes to get legislation (such as regulation) through, and one leg of that is a popular movement.

Yes, we need some kind of Social Media Users Union (though perhaps not phrased that way).

If someone offers a software with the aspiration and claim to be a replacement for proprietary product X, then they've made their bed of owing bugfixes and ease of use, now sleep in it!

"What's the use case for this? No hypotheticals please."

• we don't provide binaries, just compile it yourself
• that's fixed in the next release (date TBD), until then just run it from source
• standardalternative is deprecated, use standardfork instead (version beta 0.1 since 2017)

If I need to download 20 gigs of tooling and/or read three giant tomes that are incomprehensible to anyone without a compsci degree, it's neither free nor open.

Usually gets the point across.

I don't really know either, but one of my hypotheses is a bottom-up kind of selfishness, where the belief that by addressing personal needs and sharing is good enough.

What's missing there is the appreciation of institutions and the role they play in social cohesion. Instead: "address my needs, others will follow."

I have been telling techie types that if there is sand in supermarket bread, I don't want to go to a gourmet bakery and I can't learn to make my own bread. I want a law that punishes sand on my bread.

I had to manually set the User-Agent to get it to read CBC feeds. And it plain old doesn't work with some links that did in other commercial ones.

Like... there's no way. Forget it.

It's fantastic and I love it and I can't recommend it to anyone else because step 1 of setting one up is: configure your router to allow incoming https traffic on ports—

We need regulation on tech and tech companies.

Yet, on the Fediverse, one might be lead to believe that they’re “not worthy” or complicint if they’re not an Olympic swimmer.

Direct Action, i.e. setting up my own server, using alt tech solutions, swimming upstream constantly

This isn't cutting it

This is a network/coordination problem, not a "I can choose for myself" problem

And we're losing and the solution is that the tech companies need to be regulated, and I don't know how to make anyone listen or care

It's hard. People get that Meta is a dumpster fire. I tell them that WhatsApp is Meta. A little surprise. A little concern. But then, crickets.

You can close your accounts with Alphabet or the Meta Corporation any time

No one is forcing you to stay

No one

"Yeah, I'm not putting my thing on the old web. It's fine on Insta, everyone's there anyway"

"I'm not gonna get yet another app just to chat with you"

Etc.

"Oh, you know how to use URLs? Do you use that for the dark web? What kind of stuff are you even looking for if you need that?"