Federated software, for most people, is still entangled in a competition with mainstream social media, so the biological, psychological and social implications of the attention economy are still there. First and foremost, because they have to attract users away, and if they are boring, only people motivated by duty or politics will move and that’s a microscopic percentage. You cannot offer a pbj to a heroin addict and hope they will quit. If anything, the federated social media do not offer enough interesting content.

What you’re questioning though is somehow intrinsic to the nature of social media, especially when contrasted with social networks. Is the consumption of “content” (derogatory) in itself a problem? I would say yes, but then the solution is to ditch social media entirely. That’s a shortcoming of federated software’s (lack of) political grounding: they expect that by liberating data, they will liberate people. Such a thing never happened: software doesn’t alter social or productive relations, it just grows within the boundaries allowed by existing social structures.

It’s hard to say because I started when I was 4. I know the first one I have memory of, though: The Settlers. I was probably 5 by that point. I also have a very clear memory of my father, who would die two years later, coming back home from work, to whom I said: “I finished the first level of The Settlers before you”, to which he replied: “No shit (or something like that), you don’t have to go to work”. There, I understood work wasn’t a great thing.

I also have other memories of The Settlers and other games when my father was still alive, so it was necessarily before I was 7. These include: The Chaos Engine, Arkanoid, Cannon Fodder, Lemmings, Monkey Island 1 (it was 13 floppy disks). All of this was before I could really read and they were in English anyway (except Monkey Island), which I didn’t speak. I played on an Amiga 500.

Mitochondrium

I have a few:

• back in University I overhear some classmates I was not very familiar with talking about a girl playing Street Fighter IV competitively. They say the nickname. She was a girl I was flirting online with. I never played that game, she was from a completely other part of the country, she had no connection with my uni or the discipline of the uni. I asked her for confirmation and she said she knew the two guys, so it was actually her.

• recently: I’m talking to a girl I met after being in contact on Facebook for 10 years. She’s living in Paris, I’m living in Germany but we are both from Italy. Talking about an ex of mine, I ask her if she knows X because X and my ex have been together for a while. There was a slight chance she would have some kind of connection to him, but she says no, never heard of him. Then I start describing the guy, because he’s the most toxic guy on the planet and there are a few very clear identifying informations. She says: “Ah, yes, I know the guy, I matched with him on a dating app when I was on vacation two years ago, he was nuts”.

• one time I was hanging out with my friend G. I’m talking about my political activity as a general mutual update on how we are doing, and I mention among other things how I was trying to reach out to a few very specific publications which cover labor stuff in Italy. G is a painter, not really active in politics except very local community stuff. They say: “wait, you said xxx media? The editor-in-chief is my sister. Mind=blown”. To add to this, I have known G for like 10 years and I never really registered they had a sister.

They just allocate according to different logic than the mainstream american FOSS ideology. For instance, hackerbros, and you seem to say the same, will tell you that resources should be centralized into the biggest project in its own category to add more and more features to it. Regardless of cooptation from the private sector, this is generally a bad idea. It leads to a monoculture and monoculture leads to critical bugs impacting enormous amount of users. Also it’s predicated on the idea that there should be only a single way to fullfill a specific use-case, and that it’s the same throughout the world, erasing cultural, economic, social, biological and political differences. Optimization requires standardization, standardization requires erasure and suppression of minoritarian voices and it’s therefore oppressive. Maximizing it is not a good idea, both for technical, political and ethical reasons.

Seeding new projects that better fit local contexts, or simply produce diverse alternatives raises diversity and in turns raises resilience of the software ecosystem as a whole.

There has been for years: NLNet. It just got suspended by right-wingers. A lot of European projects were relying on it.

Clarify?

The vast majority of people do not care at all for technological autonomy, either because they don’t know about the implications or because they know and don’t care because it has very intangible effects over their life. Therefore they don’t make decisions taking into account technological autonomy or privacy.

People can learn entire, sometimes multiple languages, but learning some FOSS tools that are much more limited in scope is too difficult I guess. People who learn new languages during adulthood while working are a small minority. I speak as an immigrant who after 7 years barely speak the local language, like pretty much all my peers who didn’t take a whole year off to study. People with a job, social life, healthy relationships have very little time to focus on learning and very little incentive to do so.

FOSS is dead? (and we killed it?)

FOSS, on a political level, as a movement, it is dead. What we observe is the corpse, being a resource for value extraction processes by corporate and military organizations. The space of conflict over technology today is somewhere else: tech unionization, the post-FOSS movement, tech cooperativism, direct sabotage, public regulation. FOSS has been subsumed by the system.

https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html

are you aware that the vast majority of people can’t relate at all with the way you assign value? Or that they cannot afford the cognitive and temporal cost to adopt the technologies you mentioned? This kind of reasoning is what killed FOSS.

I feel like the last remnants of the New Atheists have retreated onto lemmy. Often when you reference spirituality, religion, or even reflections on group dynamics and psychology that doesn’t portray humans as perfectly rational self-interest decision-making machines, you get raided by these edgy “facts and logic” kids that are extremely annoying.

On reddit, they are contained in their own zoos, while here they seem to pile up even in generalist communities. It feels like 2012 all over again.

At a demo some weeks ago in Berlin I definitely saw them chasing a kid that was 12 or younger, but luckily he was swift and disappeared into the crowd that was starting to surround and corner the police after they charged the crowd from the side into an otherwise completely relaxed demo. Obviously, the kid was arab.

Police in Germany is composed of pigs as much as any other police force.

Politically, I don’t like him. He had a critical influence in the beginning of the Free Software movement, and its failure can be easily identified in the core ideas that put the freedom of the software before the freedom of the people. The fact he cared more about software than people is reflected in pretty much anything he did.

On a personal level, he seems an insufferable asshole with enough power to get away with toxic behavior. Luckily, I never had to interact with him, but his visibility for sure didn’t help marginalizing toxic egomaniacs in IT communities. Being neurodivergent is not an excuse for being an asshole. He’s the last remnant of an age that hopefully is over.

dude, after you launch the rocket is where the real game begins. You either go for a megabase or you start a overhaul mod. Restarting vanilla from scratch doesn’t really make much sense.

“debate me” kids are another stereotype on the internet though. The idea that ideas should be entertained and discussed for the sake of it and come without implications attached is just another form of edgyness. It’s another thing that often goes away with age or with touching grass. I know because I was one of them. Now I understand that the fact itself of discussing something publicly has moral implications.

Larping as a tankie is definitely a thing of immature, terminally online kids, but I wouldn’t throw Lenin in the bunch. While Stalin is mostly condemned as a reactionary psychopath by pretty much everybody except a few leftist basement-dwellers, Lenin is still read and taught throughout the world. Nothing edgy in reading Lenin.

Edgy kids on the internet worship other psychopaths like Pol Pot or Hoxha.

Advertising works, nobody denies that. If you see enough ads, on average, your mind will be changed.

Can you point to scientific literature that does prove this statement?

depicted as non-sentient animals

Have you ever read accounts of debates on the topic of native americans actually having a soul or not? Because on that ground a lot of brutalities were committed, until the church actually decided that they actually had a soul. The criticism of intellectual faculties of the colonized and their reduction to animals is an integral part of several colonial processes.

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I had to check urban dictionary to get the joke lol

My girlfriend is a professional fermenter, so I have endless amounts of fermented sauces in my immediate surroundings.

I would say the most hyped one in her network is this strawberry gochujang she’s making.

This logic totally makes sense in the world of university economy books, or international cooperation, but it’s still going to kill most people on the planet.