Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 9

It's deeply disturbing to see well-meaning activists actively campaigning for increased state-corporate censorship of the net. This is why we need our high schools to start teaching #civics to all students. So that every citizen leaves school understanding what a functioning democracy requires, and knowing the political history that shows us why that is.

"Generally speaking, individuals who are isolated or otherwise excluded or ostracized are more likely to cause harm, not less. As a result, when the safety needs of the community can be reasonably assured, reintegration back into community is one of the goals of restorative justice."
- Dr Mikhail Lyubansky, Psychology Today
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/between-the-lines/201808/louis-ck-is-doing-comedy-again-should-we-tune-in

I've referenced Garrett Hardin's infamous paper 'The Tragedy of the Commons' for years, even in conference papers, without ever having read it in full. Today I did that. Hardin uses the term "commons" in a totally different way from #ElinorOstrom. The argument he actually made in 1968 was in favour of the creation of new "commons", in the Ostrom sense of the term. I'll never think of "the tragedy of the commons" the same way again.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full

Uncomfortable as I am with military metaphors (which are all too common in activist circles), things like gOogleDocs are not the 'tools of the enemy', but their weapons. Choosing to use them is more like shooting ourselves with the guns of the enemy, than it is like using their tools. Their tools of the enemy are all the things we *don't* have access to, like the source code of the goOgle search algorithms, or the user data they use to train their machine translation algorithms.

Hey fediverse admins, have you made sure your instance is being counted by https://the-federation.info/ ? I love being able to respond with that stats site URL when people say "nobody uses federated social networks" elsewhere on the web :) It now counts nodes running any one of 36 server apps, across 9 federation protocols, including #OStatus, and #ActivityPub, reporting about 2 1/2 million users.

Also, GH use "MIT" for everything and died as an independent company, while these aforementioned companies who use #copyleft licenses are still afloat. Take note.

It just occurred to me that #GitHub ran out of money and had to sell themselves to MS. While companies like #Loomio, whose code is 100% free under #AGPL, and #Wire (A/GPL), are still in business. Doesn't that prove that the infamous "#OpenSource almost everything" creed of the GH founders is a failure, and you might as well free all your code? (looking at you #GitLab)
http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html

#TIL that while #OpenMoko Inc. might be dead, OpenMoko continues as an "open phone" project, with a volunteer community:
https://openmoko.org/

Weird that GH sold #Gitter, a mature codebase they'd kept proprietary, and which already had a significant user base, and then bought a much newer, #FreeCode chat platform like Spectrum, which is only just out of beta. What can we read between the lines here about the MS for GH going forward?

#Spectrum.chat has been acquired by MS via GH:
https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-github~1d3eb8ee-4c99-46c0-8daf-ca35a96be6ce

"Spectrum will stay open source, and we’ll continue collaborating with the open source community to serve you the best way we can."

I hope so, but given that GH keeps a bunch of their secret sauce proprietary, I'm not going to hold my breath. One less #SlackaLike to recommend ;)

#Lubuntu are switching from the discontinued #LXDE desktop to its replacement, #LXQT, from 18.10 onwards:
https://betanews.com/2018/07/30/ubuntu-linux-lubuntu-old-lxqt/

They have also announced they are dropping support for 32-bit PCs from 19.04 onwards:
https://betanews.com/2018/12/21/lubuntu-linux-32bit/

So 18.04 LTS is the last version of Lubuntu that can be recommended for use with older PCs. #Trisquel 9 will be based off 18.04 LTS, and I presume #Mate will remain the default desktop. Trisquel 8 is what I run (for now) on an ancient 32-bit Acer netbook

Everyone working directly on Collaborate is a volunteer, but "there are just a few ... base costs that you can't pay for with volunteering, things like accounting software"
#WTF? Why are charities paying for accounting software? On what planet does it make any sort of sense for a volunteer-run charity to be cross-subsidizing the expenses and profits of proprietary #SaaSS accounting platforms?!?

"But the terms and dynamics can be profoundly different, supporting startups that are intentionally less efficient, perhaps even making use of the skills of blue collar coders to provide a lot of people will good, solid middle-class jobs instead of optimizing, as current companies do, for making a small number of people enormously wealthy." - Anil Dash, 'Rebuilding the Web We Lost'
https://anildash.com/2012/12/18/rebuilding_the_web_we_lost/
#PlatformCooperatives

@adfeno so basically, if Electron was ported to #Iridium, all of these accusations of being non-free, against projects that use Electron to package their desktop apps, would evaporate overnight. The same would be true if a fully #FreeCode replacement for #Electron could be found, one that supported the 'design once, deploy everywhere' development style, but didn't inefficiently bundle most of a bloated browser inside its apps.

@deejoe

Here's the "final" comment on #ActivityPub by the informal spokesperson on inter-operationg from the #Diaspora project:
https://schub.io/blog/2019/01/13/activitypub-final-thoughts-one-year-later.html

Totally agree with him about size limits for web pages though:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/size-limits-for-web-pages/

A lot of people in web development are starting to raise the alarm about web page bloat, in the same way people were about bloatware a decade or so ago. The move back to offering static websites where possible, and even user-friendly CMS that generate static sites, is very welcome IMHO.

Some useful advice on linking practice, and avoiding #LinkRot:
https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/internet/website-linking-best-practices-media-online-publishers/

It's aimed at journalists, but also useful for bloggers and anyone else who wants the text they put on the web to remain well-referenced as time passes.

Imagine a comms #UX, where I could choose a contact, choose a rough message length (say, short, medium, or long), and the software would give me an appropriate compose UI for that length of message, and poll the receiver's comms app to determine what protocol they prefer to receive each length of message on. Eg. I could set my app to tell senders I want to receive short messages by SMS, medium ones by #ActivityPub, and long ones by email.

This extremely prescient comment was made in 1998!

#FreeAsInFreedom is back! In this episode of the #OggcCast, Bradley and Karen discuss the new wave of non-free licenses with #FieldOfUseRestrictions:
http://faif.us/cast/2018/dec/31/0x5F/