Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one

@stefan @Gargron I've worked on #decentralized systems for many years now, including #XMPP clients, #Matrix, #Tor, and @fdroidorg and I think the new #Mastodon client onboarding experience is a good idea. But it also means there is a new slippery slope towards centralization, and it needs to be heeded and monitored to make sure it doesn't do more harm than good. The good news is that there are multiple, good clients, so that helps quite a bit.

@mvgorcum the spreadsheet started with #VisiCalc, it was the "killer app" that made Apple computers take off at the beginning. Then Lotus 1-2-3 did the same for the IBM PC. Then there was Excel. Sometimes Microsoft makes good software. That is not what makes them so dominant. Their skill at deploying monopoly-building tactics is. Microsoft bought Lotus, for example, while continuing to make Excel.

@punklawyer@mastodon.sdf.org I wouldn't say that. I think his foundation has given money to some things that are actually good and useful, like the vaccination campaigns. But at the same time, he's using it as a way to promote things he's invested in. Lots of wealthy people operate this way. His foundation does still operate with monopoly mentality, e.g. their way to run vaccination is the "right way", and the only way which they will fund. Like they work against patent-free vaccines:
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/06/03/bill-gates-almost-single-handedly-derailed-plan-could-have-led-peoples-vaccine

Now given that this strategy was conceived and driven by #BillGates, I see no way he can be trusted to do anything but the same in any of his endeavors. That is his clear track record over decades. His "charity" work is also driven my #monopoly mentality, and often directly tied to his investments. Like he's investing in #nuclear and giving "charity" money to promote it as a solution to #ClimateChange .

What is #Microsoft actually good at? Going thru their key products, it is clear they don't create new paradigms, they make often buggy implementations of ideas from other people: #BASIC #MSDOS #Windows #Word #Excel #browser #Bing #Cloud #dotnet. One thing they are clearly good is building a #monopoly. So it seems what they are good at is seeing good ideas, "embrace and extend" to control it, then building monopoly profiteering.

"it’s becoming all too clear that this new tech will be used in the same ways as the last generation of digital tools: that what begins with lofty promises about spreading freedom and democracy ends up micro targeting ads at us so that we buy more useless, carbon-spewing stuff"

There are lots of promises of good around #AI #GPT #LLM etc. This all is being developed by the same owners, people and culture of #BigTech and #SiliconValley that announced "privacy is dead" and that they are "making the world a better place". They aim to disrupt whatever they can to become wealthier from it. That is what #VentureCapital is all about. Even if this tech is a good idea, the forces driving it now have a proven track record of decades of causing harm
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein

@raracool @fdroidorg F-Droid allows in-app updaters that respect #UserFreedom. In this case, that means that the in-app updater needs to communicate to the user if it is a different channel then user installed from, and give them the option to not use the in-app updater. People trust F-Droid to review apps, we would be failing them if we let apps steer users away from that review without them even realizing its happening.

@waltercool @fdroidorg If F-Droid does censorship, then we're pretty terrible at it, since we give developers and users all the tools to easily circumvent it. https://f-droid.org/2022/11/23/why-curation-and-decentralization-is-better-than-millions-of-apps.html

@lispi314 I think it is clearly still true now, from what I see, especially for devs set up to freelance. But perhaps not everywhere. It might mean doing something that is a bit out of the ordinary to find the work.

@copyrights @fdroidorg There aren't any #dotnet people involved currently, that is probably why this hasn't happened yet. Also, another aspect of this is that we need a way to verify that any libraries that an app downloads are also free software. We know how to do that for Maven repos, for example.

@copyrights @fdroidorg That's the basic idea of how lots of toolkits are handled in #FDroid. The devil is in the details, and someone just needs to actually get it building within the F-Droid setup.