We’ve played this game with browser engines and we find ourselves in a world with no viable community-controlled browser.

Read a thread on rust forum about this and my impression is that most folks fall in two ideological categories. Either “No politic here” or some form of libertarianism. I understand where both come from as I’ve gone through some form of either, and I think both are transitional for many people. I used to roll my eyes hard at people making license arguments. We’re past the point where tech corporations were playing nice with people. As they keep shitting on products and take more and more of people’s work without returning anything, more and more people from those two camps would come to the realization that everything is political and the social infrastructure of open source - the infrastructure that gets more people to do labour for a project - is what creates and keeps open source alive over the long haul. The excitement that a new language or framewwok creates is fleeting. The GPL-MIT/BSD/Apache/etc divide isn’t so much one of exact guarantees and legal rights, it is some of that, but more importantly it’s a political statement of intent.

Replace a perfectly usable GPL software for MIT? Nope. I used to fall for that ten years ago. The social infrastructure of software is more important than the exact tech used. The license is fundamental to that.

Private US corp. Used by various gov’ts around the world, the US included. It’s how gov’ts can both “not spy on their citizens” while end up having the ability to do so and use the info - by buying it from a private corpo.

At this point any US org or system gathering information on non-cis people might be feeding into Palantir’s systems for repression use.

I want to do the downvote thing but I can’t help but upvote this low reputation comment…

This

Exactly. They can’t get anything they want out of it but they can get a lot. Especially if it’s moving upwards.

This is important to know for Ubuntu users.

They can turn their market cap into liquid cash by borrowing against it. They can also pay directly in stock. E.g. how some pay their employees with more stock than salary. They can use their stock to buy other firms. The stock price and therefore market cap is not just an abstract number.

All good!

I still value GPL much higher than MIT, which is why I thought important for others to know, in case they have a preference too. But yeah, Meshcore is just not all open source and some people could also have a preference on that. 😄

That’s not what I did. Not all of Meshcore is FOSS. There are proprietary components. Therefore it’s not fully FOSS.

I don’t mind it too much. If the community itself can deal with ir by voting on the posts, it’s a more democratic solution and it has a built-in consensus. Mods killing it makes life easier but it produces more quesrions among the community abt whether that was the best course of action. Kinda like how some people feel about being censored on .ml, no offence. Isn’t that a dialectical relarionship of sorts, the effects of more vs less moderation?

I guess it depends on the people’s culture. If they come from a lib background, less moderation is more productive. If they’re used to authority taking care of things instead of them having to do the work, then more moderation is better suited or else people would complain mods aren’t doing their job.

And speaking of moderation. OP got banned. 😄

Snapshots aren’t backup. No question.

Yeah, I do spend too much time here but I think it’s important to keep the community active because we haven’t won the anti-corpo social media war yet. So we have to overcontribute in content, funding, etc. From each according to their ability, etc.

What I’ve noticed:

• The posts themselves follow almost identical structure. Large quotes with poster emphasis.
• The posting topics is almost identical.
• The reliability of sources is hit-or-miss on all posts. Some are from legit sources, some are from really questionable ones. The questionable ones are common between accounts.
• The communities where they’re all active are the same. Lately there’s a bit more separation where some accounts frequent some communities more than others. E.g. some time ago we used to get Hotznplotzn, randomname and Scotty in !Canada. Now we mostly get Scotty.
• When you engage in conversation the lang expression, attitude and arguments are identical. This when I really noticed the pattern.
• I’ve had multiple accounts from this set group up/down vote their/mine comments, deep into a discussion that didn’t attract other up/down votes.
• I’ve had a discussion that reached a dead end with one account, only for another to show up and restart it from a different angle attempting to reach a different conclusion. E.g. first discuss an economic side of some China-related issue, reach a dead end, restart with human rights abuses side on the same topic. That’s while having the group up/down voting action going on.
• Two of the accounts were created on the same date, on two different instances, a few minutes away from each other. This was the smoking gun for me that this is the same person.

Some of these aren’t damning on their own, but put altogether make me believe it’s one person. Also they never deny that when pressed. The conversation just stops and they disappear for a day or two until the next post.

a disgruntled Hong Kong exile with too much time on their hands

Quite possibly. I think they may live in Germany or be German because I’ve seen some activity in German. Who knows. I doubt they’re a paid actor because there’s enough money in the official media machine pushing this line so I think you’re right. Someone who really hates China/CCP/CPC, perhaps for a good reason of their own, with a lot of free time. It really sucks because there are really interesting discussions that can be had on any of these topics. There’s another guy around here whose family emigrated from China because they weren’t having a great time with the 1-child policy among other things. He’s in the US and can have rational and interesting discussion about this stuff without bursting in flames.

E: Here’s a recent unhinged discussion with Scotty.

Fact, but since that’s common and cheap, and I’m not aware of an equivalent FOSS alternative, I’d go with Meshtastic, if were to dabble. And I dabble. :D

Pretty sure these are all the same person. If you ever engage, you can recognize the same asshole attitude. I’ve seen multiple of them up/down vote comments where no one else has. Don’t think they do that anymore cause it’s too obvious.