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Most Johnly of Henries

It's crazy to think that the primary bottleneck to federated social adoption was just one person deciding to implement one in Ruby on Rails. I have to underscore how exciting it is that even extremely basic attention to developer / user UX inspires huge ripples of "anybody wanting to use actually use a thing".

Not saying Mastodon is definitely going to take off & the others are definitely going to fail, but I'm constantly blown away by how just unfriendly most open-source communities are. Just a tiny dash of friendliness and look what happens.

@johnhenry

I keep finding my friends in desperate need of a well-equipped task tracking system allowing branching and blocking tasks and project clustering and tags and stuff

Taskwarrior is *perfect* for my and many others' needs, and is FOSS

except... it's command line only... for no discernable reason... despite having seen frequentish development for... a decade????

it's a goddamn joke. FOSS purports to make free software- but if it can't be used by anybody, it's not actually free.

@twryst To be fair, I like command-line interfaces for a lot of things, but I agree that a huge number of developers fail to consider the benefits of nice UI design and are hurt for it.

@twryst @johnhenry 95% of the world already caters to you GUI people; kindly don't complain that the restof us have any at all - and thanks for the recommendation.

@puellavulnerata I'd say 95% of the serious software development world caters to command-line people, because command-line is vastly more efficient for professionals in most cases :). It's more the "RTFM" / hostile attitudes that accompany hardcore software development communities that is a turn-off to me, & wish every platform had nice gradient between "hello, new child!" and the nitty-gritty of RTFM efficiencies.

@johnhenry
> 95% ...
if that were true I wouldn't run across things like client-side window decoration that break X11 apps if I even use a window manager that isn't a bloaterrific 'desktop environment' :/

As for hostile attitudes, largely agreed. I gave up kernel development years ago after I tried to get some driver updates and fixes in for a device I was using (Cyclades PC-300 T1/E1 board) in, and got flamed because the original driver I was patching...

@johnhenry ...(which had all kinds of memory alignment and pointer size assumptions I had to fix for sparc64, and was by then not even buildable because of kernel HDLC layer changes) had a lot of pre-existing style/lack of comments issues. Sorry, but getting yelled at for someone else's bad code that they already let into the kernel because my patch touched it and didn't fix it all at once is a bit much to put up with.

@puellavulnerata Both of those sound like legit awful experiences :/. You would think open source is important enough to attract people with basic reasonableness traits, but FOSS development is understandably a seller's market for whoever wants to put in the time to maintain projects. WTB "Army corps of software engineers"

@twryst @johnhenry this is because the average person who cares about FOSS is a CLI person, and 99.99% of everyone else doesn't care about freedom (as defined by FSF etc)

@sonya @johnhenry
Doesn't that put the causality backward here? It seems absurd to say people wouldn't care about being able to trust the tools they use- but if the tool is unusable by everybody who isn't comfortable with a CLI, the tool clearly isn't intended for them to begin with.

I'd claim that FOSS has failed at its purported goals if it's not genuinely trying to liberate users, regardless of technical background, from abusive closed software; Hardly seems like trying if it's inaccessible

@twryst @johnhenry my point is that users don't *want* to be liberated, they want useful tools, which usually emerge from profit incentives

@sonya @johnhenry
If "being liberated" requires "literally unusable to the point of uselessness for the vast vast majority of users", then yes, they don't want to be liberated.
Also, software constructed pursuant to profit incentives *is commonly worse*. Matlab is single-threaded... so that trying to parallelize it require buying 1 license/core. Users can't trust their social network is truthfully connecting them with others... cause the network needs to wring money from content creators. +

@johnhenry @sonya
The examples abound, endlessly- why aren't nazis being banned on twitter? Their metrics are about *number of tweets*, not about *quality of interactions* or *user personal growth due to use*. Why does my Pixel not have an SD card slot? so they can overcharge me for a larger built-in memory. Bloatware on initial boot? A lack of updates to corporate versions of android? Designed-to-fail devices to ensure regular 2yr purchases? Do people *want* ads on windows 10 desktops? +

@twryst @johnhenry the commercial system isn't perfect, but like you said yourself, it produces way better products than FOSS

@sonya @johnhenry

For technology built in the user's best interest, Liberation and Utility are coaligned goals, antithetical to profitability - unless due to developer culture, pursuing Liberation precludes accessibility.

The fact that FOSS communities refuse to develop for the needs and skill levels of anybody outside their effectively-unbreachable communities annihilates the otherwise immense potential good their hard work could otherwise be doing- for, as far as I can tell, no benefit.

@johnhenry @sonya @puellavulnerata

(sorry for tootstorm, kinda went overboard there <.< *tugs at shirt collar*)

@twryst @puellavulnerata @sonya you have solid toots, my friend. Always Be Tooting.

@twryst @sonya @johnhenry if people have software requirements currently unmet by FOSS then they should join communities and become active within them. Even if you are not a software engineer there are always other ways to help. Liberation will not arrive by passively waiting for someone to hand it to you. You have to become part of it.

@bob @johnhenry @twryst realistically, that's just not going to happen, because liberated software is not in-and-of-itself important to most people

@bob @twryst @sonya @johnhenry That is true, but it's also a fact that people should stop and evaluate their stated purposes for doing things and whether they are doing the right things to best fulfill those purposes.

Nobody can tell you what to do, but that doesn't mean nobody can wake you up.
@twryst @sonya @johnhenry the problem in all of those cases can be summarised in one word: capitalism
@twryst @johnhenry for me the fact that Taskwarrior does not require getting involved with clumsy GUIs, dragging anything around, etc, is an advantage. I used Task warrior for quite a while, but now use org-agenda because it fits better with my workflow.

@johnhenry I share your enthusiasm, and don't want to be a downer, but there are still major hurdles to be cleared for mainstream adoption. Like who's going to pay for all the servers to support a twitter-sized userbase.

@kevin_redacted Haha, I didn't mean to imply this instance is a home-run or anything. People will probably have to start paying for previously free services.

But it feels like the conversation re: open social networks has been stalled for years, & someone managed to inch the conversation forward massively with a just a small change in mentality over existing approaches. I dunno, I'm excited about it.

@johnhenry yeah, that's true - although to an extent, I think it's also a question of the moment being right. Twitter has to fuck up enough to make a critical mass of people interested in switching, and they're finally crossing that tipping point.

@puellavulnerata Oh, definitely. That's probably the bigger factor.

@puellavulnerata @johnhenry this may be true but unfortunately I don't think Mastodon will be the answer. A true federation would not have the identities tied to instances.