0xtero

u/0xtero@beehaw.org
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It’s been 12 years since Heartbleed and we’ve had numerous ”lone maintainer” issues since then. The situation shouldn’t come as a surprise or be especially ”hard to believe”.

This is the state of free software, especially when it matures.

Unless the creators manage to roll some kind of ”commercial” version, it’s not very sustainable in the long run. Turns out many eyes don’t really equal many PRs

You are correct about the awareness part. Sometimes I forget that people make tech choices a big part of their identities (like being an "Apple user") and fixing problems becomes a social cost, more than a technical or privacy choice.

While I always love a good privacy tantrum and throwing your toys out of the pram, I don’t really get why there has to be a public announcement of ”switching”.

But I guess it’s his blog, so whatever. Wish him the best of luck with the new HP 2-in-1. Hope he remembered to turn off all the tracking features in his Ubuntu.

on *Permanently Deleted* · c/privacy · 2 pts · 253d

It’s a fool’s errand unfortunately. Users stay in spaces because their friends and social circles are there. It doesn’t really matter how shitty the platform becomes. The social cost of moving is just too high.

The solution is interoperability and some regulation. Unfortunately we have neither. All you can do is inform your mom about the dangers and teach her to recognise propaganda and abuse.

Would recommend reading Cory Doctorow’s book ”Enshittification”

I fail to see organized attempts to challenge advertisements.

I think lot of that is embedded in the privacy communities/movement, so it gets easily overlooked as a separate part, even though most of the time it actually is the cause of the disease. Many times it's just easier to treat the symptoms ("just install adblocker, bro") because the real cure is to topple the entire system and challenge our late stage capitalism. That tends to be a bit too much for a "normie" who doesn't necessarily even see the constant flow of ads as a problem and even if they do, installing a browser plugin tends to be "lol, too much work"

I tend to agree. We won't have any "content creators" because it's so hard to monetize fedi - and that's a good thing! Instead we have people who post stuff they like and are interested in. It's far better system. No ads, no "influencing".

However, it would be great if we could create a better model for sharing hosting costs somehow - bandwidth and servers are not cheap when serving video. Donations work to an extent, but it's always a shaky system based on kindness of select few.

Surely the ability to pay for things exists already in many forms/platforms.

But one thing that's missing is central financing from the platform itself. The "big tech" is running wild with advertising money and this is what fuels the rapid growth.

Things like Nebula seem to work (creator owned business that offers paid subscriptions), but I'm not sure how many Nebula-exclusive creators there are, I have a feeling most of them publish stuff on YouTube as well.

Mastodon and Lemmy communities work on donations, but most of them just trundle along barely covering hosting costs.

I guess, in theory, it would be possible to create a PeerTube/Loops server that monetizes everything with ads, but I'm a bit skeptical of that unless you have very deep start-up VC money behind you to get you off the ground.

We've had micropayment/-donation sites like Flattr, but it never took off for real.

I think the core problem is trying to make people to pay for the content/service/membership. Most don't. I don't think that would change even if the option was integrated into platforms.

It's great as long as you can guarantee that the person you're communicating on the receiving side does the same. Otherwise it's useless as your messages will be read on the receiving device. In practice it will make private communication extremely cumbersome and niche.

Also, the authorities can backdoor your custom ROM device at will, when seized.