Like, the least a corporation could do is follow basic legality here, right? Or basic decency in stating that they just forked 4 popular Android apps and are calling that a service?

Actually, even the iOS apps are just forks of iOS apps (Amaroq and Riot at least -- I can't find the VPN app they probably forked). And no Librem Mail, because, well... there are no good email apps on iOS. 😩

OK, so I found @purism source at source.puri.sm (which wasn't advertised anywhere on the Librem One site or app listings, still). Looks like the source is published (and therefore not violating GPL), but this could still be put somewhere more prominent.

OK, now this is seriously interesting: #Purism's fork of the #Mastodon server (known as #Smilodon) has two particular changes that caught my eye.

First, they disabled the public timelines, as well as private posts: https://source.puri.sm/liberty/smilodon/commit/5c02796594b73908cd8197d2f72d17b7c9760d10

Second, they disabled reports? https://source.puri.sm/liberty/smilodon/commit/9cae431902a2c0ce6438c6722a3a901e279c78fc

I can maybe understand the first one. Maybe they just want to focus purely on timelines. And technically, private posts aren't perfectly secure. So you can reduce complexity by just removing those two features overall.

But why would you remove reports entirely, then? Not only does this mean librem.one users can't report any abuse, but also incoming reports about abusers on librem.one will be rejected.

It's one thing to simply not implement federated reports, but it's another to strip it out...

@trwnh You’re giving people too much credit. They don’t care at the end of the day for stealing other people work without crediting. It’s a horrible culture of if it’s on the internet it’s free to use as I want without crediting the original because I said “No copyright intended”.

@TheKuroKuma Still, you'd expect better out of a "social purpose corporation" or whatever SPC is supposed to stand for. It's not even about freedom of usage necessarily, it's about attribution. People tend to confuse the two.

@trwnh i can barely understand the technical nitty gritty here, but.. god bless you for going through this absolute trainwreck

stripping out the ability to report abuse. amazing. this is absolutely peak tech dudebro

@trwnh it's weird but the mission statement does mention a full suite of moderation and filtering tools (https://source.puri.sm/liberty/smilodon)

Maybe there's a plan to reimplement, perhaps differently?

Also the April 1st commit date did catch my eye but it's maybe not relevant.

@crowpersona @trwnh Not according to their policy, which is "no company should control speech".

@brainblasted @trwnh something does not compute, indeed

@trwnh now there are three projects called smilodon lol

but purism should have just used Pleroma, you can do all of that via configuration here lol

@kaniini smilodons for the smilodon god

@trwnh Also interesting that they managed to get gargron to code these features for them

@sn0w https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/101619622745659720

@sn0w @trwnh gargron worked for purism for a while, not sure if he still does

@trwnh Wait a minute, these rebranded applications and services are not even ports to their own Debian-based phone OS?
What the what?

@therealraccoon PureOS "coming soon", obviously! They haven't ~found enough apps to fork yet~ (well, there's Fractal -> Chatty)

@trwnh Maybe, just maybe they should deliver on the whole libre phone platform thing first?
You know, as in the reason people are actually kind of interested in what they're trying to do?

@therealraccoon @trwnh while I agree with this take, bootstrapping a company is hard, and offering services does seem like a valid stepping stone towards getting people to eventually use other Purism products, while taking more money to produce more goods.

In a way, their attempts at building an ecosystem vaguely resembles Apple, in the sense that they're likely trying to build a halo effect. They can eventually point to their own phones and say "Hey, remember those apps you're already using for Librem One? Well, we offer those on our phones, too."

@sean @trwnh Emulating lock-in?

@sean @trwnh @therealraccoon I get what they're doing (create a services ecosystem; which is important with so many proprietary/privacy-unrespecting services that make up a lot of what users use) but I also worry that they're spreading themselves too thin trying to make laptops, a phone with an ecosystem conjured essentially from scratch, and now trying to unify all sorts of disparate open source servers and clients into some unified brand - the money could run out, so I hope they have a plan to deal with that.

@libc @sean @therealraccoon i'd much rather see purism focus on their own platform instead of chasing down others. why add more value to android/ios?

they're not offering anything new, even. people can just use amaroq/tusky/k9-mail/riot/openvpn/pia as-is. why maintain forks at parity just for a rebrand?

@trwnh @sean @therealraccoon yeah, purism's efforts are best spent on their HW and trying to get their (IMHO not a good idea, but that's something else entirely) mobile platform in shape - people like e and nextcloud can handle the "libre services" angle, especially for cross-platform

@libc @sean @therealraccoon disagree that nextcloud and e are enough, or even good services for the most part. they're fine for personal use but most people are not going to go to the effort of setting up their own services.

@trwnh @sean @therealraccoon [loose bundle of thoughts follow] yeah, they're not perfect, and they target DIYers/enterprise essentially

i also wonder if the "loose bundling of kind of related services" is even viable too - you get accusations of pointless forking, and if you haven't done bare-minimum tying things together with LDAP SSO or whatever, that can be annoying

@libc @sean @therealraccoon looks like they use LDAP and autofill the domain at least.

@sean @therealraccoon well they're not going about it in an effective way, if that's their strategy

i'm not against purism offering services, and in fact, i think that they should! but they need to do it in a way that makes sense. more like google than like apple. pretty much no one uses apple's services; pretty much everyone uses google's.

if that means running their own mastodon/matrix/mail servers, fine, cool. there's certainly room for more service providers like disroot.

@sean
The whole ordeal kinda makes me sad about people. The target audience seems to be the privacy questioning non technical people. Which in itself is fine but its an ugly implication that these great free-as-in-freedom apps need to be marketed as a paid service to get the attemtion and validation of the masses. Like the price tag is the source of its legitimacy.

I don't criticize capitalism very often but normal people that appeal to this concept sound brainfucked to me (by the izm)
@therealraccoon @trwnh

@Dielan @trwnh @therealraccoon @sean Maybe Pursim just wants to appear "inovative" by hiding their repos and branding it as thier own. After a while it will look like Purism is the upstream of all communications

@trwnh agree wish #thunderbird was available I use it on my Mac at work

@amolith The listing on Google Play is "OpenVPN for Android" but as I said further down the thread, I wasn't able to find the iOS VPN app that they forked. It's kind of ironic they forked PIA considering their infographic lists PIA as a non-libre competitor under "Other"...

@trwnh I didn't even look at the apps in Google Play. Yes that's OpenVPN for Android. In that case, they may be running their own VPN server but I kind of doubt it; I remember hearing a lot a little while ago about them partnering with PIA and putting it on the L5 by default.