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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I really hate most subscriptions, because the prices are often too high, they rely on locking stuff behind paywalls, instead of providing a good service.

    Here is the difference, I am ok paying monthly for storage space, servers, and hosted/managed open source web services, because there is competition and standard interfaces there. They do not hold you (or your data) hostage to their service, what they provide is good on its own.

    For example, if GOG invests money into writing open source libraries, apps and APIs to efficiently and easily share save games between devices. Let people self host the open source backend, but offer up a subscription for a managed instance, with maybe some voting rights for new features or support for games/platforms to be integrated into the open source front & backend, then I would be willing to support this.

    And other stuff like this.

    Use subscriptions to offer good services, which also allow you to improve the whole ecosystem, while also not putting yourself as the gatekeeper, and locking people into their service.


  • Well, that could have been fixed by booting from an usb stick, chrooting into you real system and either downloading and (re)installing the python package this way, or, if your package manager depends on python, download the package in the Live Linux and extracting the python package into your system, and then reinstalling it, so the package management overwrites your “manual installation”.

    Could be tedious, but less so that having to reinstall everything IMO.






  • But as long as they are RISC V chips, then they would run the same software as any other RISC V chips.

    Not necessarily, RISC-V is permissibly licensed, so they could add proprietary extensions, that would make the binaries or even compilers only work with their implementation of the RISC-V ISA.

    Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactics would work on RISC-V, and I trust billionaires and huge corporations to enshittify it.

    Big player joins RISC-V, creates design, introduces proprietary extensions, builds compilers that use them, software depend on them, other RISC-V designers need to license them, because the whole platform now depends on them.

    Also based on how complicate it is to port Linux to different SoCs, which at least share a common ISA, it will be much more difficult if you need to support even more RISC-V ISAs with different proprietary extensions, not only in the kernel, but in the toolchain as well.






  • There are different degrees of vendor lock in. If you use email (or Matrix) with a domain, you have no control over, you are soft-locked it. You can buy a domain, self-host or pay for a managed service and inform everyone that you are now reachable over some other address, but nobody else has to change.

    If you use Signal (or Discord or whatever) and want to switch to a different domain. You cannot. If you switch to a different protocol, everyone in your contacts has to switch as well, or you lose that contact. The network effect forces you into the service of one provider. The only way out of there would be if the service get so bad, that a critical mass leaves, but you will have to deal with that bad service all the way.

    As long as financial interest are there, non-federated services will sooner or later start to enshittyfy. So if you choose a communication medium, choose something that leaves your options open. If you don’t like Matrix, try XMPP, it has come a long way as well.






  • The company (Signal Messenger LLC) is fully owned by Signal Foundation, a 501©3 non profit organization.

    OpenAI is also non-profit. Not really an argument.

    Probably around 80-90% of Matrix users are on the matrix.org homeserver, so it’s absolutely not as decentralized and resilient as you think it is.

    Well, the goal is that moving to your own server, will not mean that you will loose access to all your contacts. Which makes moving instances much simpler. If Matrix gets a hostile take-over, your don’t really need to reach a critical mass for an alternative server.