This post has content warnings for: Bitter post about mastodon.
- she/her
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Mutant, librarian, poet, union rabble rouser, dog, Ashkenazi Jewish. Neuroweird, bodyweird, mostly sleepy.
I write about transformative justice, community, love, Judaism, Neurodivergence, mental health, Disability, geography, rivers, labor, and libraries; through poetry, opinionated essays, and short fiction.
I review Schoolhouse Rock! songs at @PropagandaRock
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in reply to @shel's post:
Agree but I'm sad about it bc I spent a long time on there and a long time believing it was going to fix most of our problems...
Me too!!! I was the truest believer of them all. It makes me very sad to think about very often it was very important to me
thanks for this. we only partially agree but it's an interesting perspective that we haven't seen elsewhere, which we'll need to think about.
Like mt argument isn't even that it's necessarily Bad either but I just can't see it as an inherent good anymore.
This is something I've been thinking about too, not just with Mastodon but with other FOSS in general. In the last few years I've seen the start of discussions about what an ethical FOSS license would look like, but... nothing really settled. Instead it's feels like it's just settled into a "the only response to hate speech is more speech" sort of attitude, where software freedom is the first and only goal that you can solve by making... more software.
I also feel like a lot of free software has the problem of simultaneously believing that
- Spreading their software is an incredibly important ideological goal, and yet
- No piece of software is so important that you should feel personally responsible for how it's used.
At its core a lot of projects seem to feel the same way about their software as corporations do, even though the goal isn't money - spreading software is a neutral good, and if some bad actors get access to it, that can't be prevented. And it's not great! I can't square those two beliefs with each other, especially with something as integral to the goals of bad actors as speech-dissemination software like social media.
I still believe really strongly in open source/free software so it doesn't make me feel good to feel like something closed source is better at accomplishing these kinds of societal goals than open source, but. I'm looking at cohost and I'm looking at Mastodon, and there's more than just software licensing involved in building something the fascists aren't going to take advantage of, you know?
Yeah for sure I think what the software is is a huge factor. An audio codec should be FOSS. Fascists aren't gonna really be abusing that y'know. But building a mass media platform they can use as technology to organize? Maybe that shouldn't be FOSS.
Yeah. I'm thinking about it and, well. The fact that the very first FOSS project was an OS feels like it fits, huh? Something foundational, something you use to accomplish your other goals but that isn't itself something a bad actor is using to accomplish their goal, right?
As someone who's been a FOSS advocate for, like, 20 years now... thinking about it this way isn't comfortable, but at the same time, you know. Something needs to change.