this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Just goes back to what the use case is. You're alluding to a case where Discord is being used for content that should be easily searchable on the wide internet. Platforms like Discord including the FOSS alternatives aren't good for that by their very design. The notion that every web service should be wide open and searchable is antithetical to privacy, which is ironically often cited as a huge downside to Discord. With the privately hosted Matrix instance I use with close friends for instance being isolated from the wide internet is the whole point.
Discord is advertising itself as a public forum for all communities to call home. They even implemented forum and threading features. Just like their productivity features meant to compete with slack. The features aren't there to be useful. But to lure users into a golden cage. Discord's product is not usability, it's nitro subscriptions. Just like Google doesn't give two shits about searching and indexing, because their actual product is advertisements. Discord will just follow whatever fad is on the zeitgeist at the moment to ensnare new users. And any feature will be enshittified and mutated to serve nitro sales, never to serve the user's needs and use cases.
My use case is finding good online communities for my offline interests wherever they exist, and I've found some solid ones on Discord. This is why I agree with every point you've raised but find them ineffective at making me want to not use it. I value the connections I make with people through the platform more than any of the nerd reasons why I'm supposed to be bad for using it. Ultimately I don't care about the platforms that much, they're just transient things which come and go. So I'll host a Matrix instance until something else is better, I'll use Discord for running my weekly dnd group because nothing else worked for everyone and it's been solid for 3 years. "Discord's product is not usability" ...okay I guess I'll stop using it now. /s That just falls flat. To stop using it the reasons I use it will have to go away.
I've faced similar arguments about how I have a Windows machine for media creation, people try to debate me that there's better alternatives assuming I haven't tried them or that I don't prioritize FOSS, but they don't even have a connection to the scene I use this stuff for and they think some nerd technology argument is a valid reason to stop doing what I love. It's like yeah every point raised is completely valid, but people will debate the ins and outs of platforms and software before they ever apply them to something beyond themselves.
It's like okay you don't like the new Milwaukee battery line of tools, but here's a kitchen I made with them so just stfu and eat your food.
No one is trying to make you do something. This thread is about the hypocrisy and irony of FOSS projects using a proprietary platform that fundamentally goes against the movement values and principles. No one cares what you do in your life. You are not that important.
"The movement values and principles" is a fairy tale tech hobbyists tell themselves to feel like their consumer preferences have grandiose importance.
90% of your tech usage runs on and depends upon said fairy tale. FFS you're on a Lemmy instance.
Nah it depends on physical infrastructure and programs which aren't capable of having values and principles. You mean people ascribe values and principles as their motivation for working on said programs, which I don't doubt.
Programs and infrastructure people built for a reason, and those reasons are always political. Everything is political. Even the very internet system you use being open to the public and the world is a result of some political decisions decades ago, nevermind FOSS.
Gates once called Linux communism and yeah, he was right. FOSS is the closest thing to practicable communism.
It's a route of exploitation. FOSS developers aren't often paid for their labor, and what they produce is often commodified by capital. Products of people's leisure are exploited basically, and they justify it through this moral framework, but no class dynamics are impacted and actually the opposite, they become reified even more.
If Linux or foss had the ability to impact political economy in some communist way we'd have seen it by now, so this is like a deus ex machina myth for tech hobbyists to elevate themselves, an evangelical tech religion. As a Marxist myself this stuff just makes me laugh, the irony of a creature like Bill Gates calling something communist and embracing it with pride.
If you want to put faith in technology and the internet changing the world for the better, just realize since the dawn of all this stuff wealth inequality and economic stresses have only increased until a full blown crisis in 2008 of the consenting economic model. Now as these stresses turn inward we see it culminating in what we might call neofascism.
Capitalism subsumes, that's no surprise and that's a function of it, it's nothing specific to technology, you can buy Das Kapital at amazon.com now and you could buy it in a book shop run by capitalists before. Disco Elysium while fiction - has excellent commentary on this as well when it comes to critiques.
Technology is value agnostic, more obvious than ever with information age era tech, but at least in my experience, it has done way more good than bad, I don't think I'd be alive without the internet honestly and the efforts of FOSS and the culture of information sharing and all of it has been to the detriment of both cultural and capital control.
The thought that I'd pay for media is something scary and otherworldly, the thought I'd be gatekept from accessing certain information instead of just being able to find info I'd be dead without.
Just as income inequality has widened (which is not as a consequence of any specific technology anyway turn of the 20th century was far worse) , and the reactionaries get more brazen, we see global class consciousness on a scale previously unseen and the openness of the average person to progressive ideas and critiques of the establishment.
Gates didn't embrace Linux, MS did after him and their "embrace,extend,extinguish" approach failed massively, for every FOSS project that gets taken over by capital there are so many more that don't and can't.
We're on one right now, I would like to believe. Time will tell of course. But your doomerism while entertaining is counterproductive. I think it's okay to be indifferent, but to actually actively advocate FOSS as politically useless is just doing the capitalists' demoralization for them.
Maybe you consoom mindless corporate drivel, I P2P pirate everything, have never seen an ad and I self host FOSS versions of anything and everything.
Right, you're establishing a moral superiority by your consumption model. I have the same consumption model but not vain enough to think the way I watch movies has any moral significance.