Who does use FOSS? Hobbyists, and the inner machinery of the worst organizations in the world.

It was already notorious that FOSS advocates were often at odds with writers and independent artists, who have to sell their work to survive. FOSS has been part of the alienation of IT workers from workers in general.

Outside Fediverse, and occasionally even on it, I see "fossbros" advocating for "GenAI" on the grounds that artists charge too much for creative work.

And at some point, I have to ask whether it's even ethical to do volunteer work when the main beneficiaries of your free labor are surveillance and propaganda organizations, and the military.

Fighting it otherhow, on the other hand, would be good. Build up a community where people contribute and receive, not just skim off.

Instead of writing an adventure for a home group, thinking it's pretty good, and putting it up on a forum for free for others to enjoy, everyone puts it up on DTRPG to make a quick buck.

As someone who started their growing-up before the advent of omnipresent computing, and someone who really did get into that stuff in adolescence and had high hopes for it, I'm still a bit astonished by how hidebound the technology sector really is—totally at odds with their pose as being always ahead of the curve and capable of any act of creation or transformation.

"WE CAN DO ANYTHING WE ARE GODS!" "oh then could we maybe drop the fixation on C/C++ with thousands of other programming languages existing now?" "shut up C is God's programming language"

But if you're just putting it on a server to run some sort of website that attempts to extract money from consumers?

They track all the awful trends faithfully, they like to brag about how Linux &c. are used by major corporations now as a way of asserting Linux's superiority, and they're all hideously obsessed with collecting easy money through rental schemes and crypto gambling and every other sort of dodge by which people can be cheated out of money via software.