sparseMatrix

Sounds like a pretty good feature request XD by no means do I want to see lemmy be an exact copy of reddit, but you can follow people over there, and it seems a usefull thing to do.

My problem with masto is that it's a pretty decent twitter replacement that I found while looking for a facebook replacement. I figured out two things real quick: I really didn't want use anything similar to facebook after all, and while masto came a bit closer to what I'd wanted, in the five or six years I've used it since, I've become a master of cooking my thoughts down to 500 characters.

I don't feel like it was a productive challenge; more often than not I came away feeling semi-muted.

I'll call it the twitter limitation, because I know masto kind of inherited it.

I just found it limiting. Go figure :)

THAT SAID, the masto devs make really good software, without qualification.

This Is The Way.

Wots the scoop, Chef?

When I was a child, a lot of things now made primarily in China and Taiwan were made in the United States or Japan. Things of particularly good quality and of advanced technology came from the US; cheap trinkets came from Japan, and China was literally starving. When we wouldn't finish our meals as children, our mothers would literally tell us 'there is a starving child somewhere in China right now who would love to have (insert child-hated food here).

China does so well because in the 70s and 80s the large corporations shipped manufacturing jobs and technologies to Japan and China. China literally does so well because Americans who needed things made got too greedy. Since then much of the skilled working class in America has disappeared, because if there are not jobs for you then what good is training and education? Until Americans stop subsidizing Asia without consumer-driven outsourced manufacturing, China will continue to do well. After that? Chinese policy will really matter to the Chinese, who still have not developed the means to feed their vast populations.

oK, I will cheerfully admit that you weren't imagining things; that said, I think the masto devs have generally made at least the appearance of evil here, which is potentially as bad as just plain old evil.

Limiting access to FOSS is bad. Everyone involved in FOSS knows that. If they were going to do something like this, they could have at least kept it between themselves and their beta testers, and not made a point of telling everyone they had to be a patreon supporter to get access. Do they have an interest in the success of patreon? if not, what then is their motivation in using a selection metric so directly associated with their cash flow? At some point, they must understand that a donation is made voluntarily, and if you require a donation, now or previously - your software or service is simply not free, and you have been made to pay for it, and that payment is not a donation but a charge.

For the record, I'm not overly invested in your opinion of me. I'm simply sharing my views. I respect your right to differ with me ;)

Hey thanks, I will give that a look :)

I guess you don't have matching statistics for other economies, you know, to maybe add some perspective to your asswertions. But no, I guess not, as your goal is to demean and divide, not present a proper picture of any one state of affairs.

Hmmmm, whatever floats your boat. I find it highly constraining, but I do like to go on. No doubt the result of a couple years of instruction in collegiate level English composition.

Also, it's more a platform limitation (masto tries to go head to head with twitter) than anything,

In any case, the source of my actual butthurt with mastodon today is this thing they're doing with the android beta. Where you have to be subscribed to their patreon to get it. Honestly, I dgaf about getting the android client; I hate my phone and it's because of the handcuffed, bastardized linux it runs. However I am deeply committed to FOSS, having developed, tested and in fact made a living with it for decades. My beef isn't that I think everything is supposed to be free, it's that I think anything advertised as FOSS damn well better be free or they can anticipate hearing from those pf us who take Free and Open damned seriously. There are a million ways they can directly support themselves in developing mastodon without practically taking a segment of their user base hostage for the FOSS code.

That Is Not The Way.

That was true before there was Russ aggression against Ukraine.

If you want to fix the world, fix the world. Don't blame all the world's problems on a single unjust action against a backdrop of a sea of such actions.

Actually, so would I for almost everything - except journalism. Why? because wikipedia was never intended to be used that way. Reading news there is like searching for a palimpsest on a roll of recycled toilet paper. Sure, it could be there, but why would you ever think to look there for it?

Wikipedia has a big part to play, but this kind of thing just brings the information war right up onto the pages of what is arguably the best reference we have.

Curation suggests that we should protect it from becoming involved in an ideological tug of war lest it be damaged in the process.

just....NO.

This is not FOSS. This Is Not The Way.