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Introducing Librem Social

puri.sm

51 pointskgwxd18 comments

I remain hopeful that projects like this are a way for commercial interests to funnel money and development to the upstream open source project owners. Purism talks a big game about being a social purpose company. Lets see if they can follow through with their self-imposed commitments. Thus far, it does seem like some the greater mobile gtk toolchain has benefited as result of these efforts on the librem phone, but that's a pretty small niche right there. It doesn't seem like they are integrating with the upstream projects as much for these social/communication services as much as they are with their mobile stuff.

I think the reason they're not integrating upstream on the social stuff as much is because they've removed more than added. They do less, on purpose. I like that their Mastodon instance doesn't have the firehose. It seems to help keep peoples posts more diverse and personal and avoids people feeling like they have to pick a side and comment on whatever is #trending today. If they gave the option to turn on the firehose, it would loose that feel because many of the users would fall into the same trap. Even if they still post interesting stuff, their overall feed could be lower quality.

I loved purism. Got their laptops. But the OS and most software (and i am sure this social network too) is a fly-by-night operation. At best!

The laptops too, in a way. They are nice but for the price should have been nicer (e.g. no USB C charging or monitor out, etc, for a machine more expensive than a maxed out mac or HP). Everything they do just scream "we slapped those things together. Now pay us".

Now they are riding the waves of the librem5 hype... and i am sure they will deliver just because the competition on mobile phones is abysmal.

I heard this is a sort of hail-mary for the company's existence, that they need recurring revenue and need it badly.

Their products haven't been selling well and if you look at the last few puri.sm updates posted on HN they didn't even attract 10 comments if any at all.

The last macbook update thread was past 1000 comments when I read it.

If the HN crowd isn't interested in a privacy-oriented FSF-friendly computing devices, who is?

I think people here are interested in the Librem 5. Laptops are already easy enough to make your own with just a few compromises, and I don't think many people would choose PureOS over other Linux distros. But the phone space has 3 choices iOS, Google Android and open Android (e.g. LineageOS). The open Android options are forced to run on fairly locked down hardware made by companies that have no interest in open sourcing anything and don't want any hardware buttons, no matter how useful they might be. There's a desperate need for a mobile device made for general purpose computing.

Maybe because the Mac platform (or Windows and Android) are platforms that have proven a developer can make money there.

Are these apps open source? I'm curious to see if they changed mastodon in any meaningful way.

From what I hear they took out all the moderation tools.

edit: ah, here's the commit which does it. https://source.puri.sm/liberty/smilodon/commit/9cae431902a2c...

"- Return error from reports REST API - Remove links to report in web UI - Reject reports from ActivityPub"

(which is to say, if you're using it, the 'report' functionality is gone, and if someone on a remote instance hits the 'report' button on a toot from Purism and says 'send this report to my admin and Purism's admin' then Purism will just error out instead of accepting the error.)

I really dunno what possessed Eugen to think that was a good idea. Apparently this commit has been reverted but I've still defederated my instance from Purism because who the hell knows when they'll think this sounds like a good plan again?

I don't understand why you'd have to dig through another instance's git history and make a judgment call based on a reverted implementation detail.

Doesn't Mastodon have tools to notify the admin or even temporarily defederate based on X number of user reports from a given instance?

"Purism's instance removed all moderation tools" is the reason I have an opinion on them at all. I only realized they reverted that when linking to the commit where they broke it for my previous comment.

I might change my mind on defederating them if the users of my instance weigh in, but forty years of growing up along with the Internet has given me a rather jaundiced view of the ability of people whose primary concerns are softwarefreedom* to make sensible moderation decisions. Especially when they've started from a position of "we can completely opt out of moderating our social software, it'll be great, I'm sure everyone will behave like adults" and had to be argued out of that.

Fair warning to anybody thinking of using Librem Social: it's a Mastodon instance whose management seems willing to tolerate speech that most of the rest of the Fediverse finds objectionable. Don't expect that you'll be able to interact with users of other Mastodon instances, as their admins may refuse to federate with Librem Social.

The "main" mastodon.social instance isn't choosing to ban them at this time: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/102180995301556021

Also, from the article: "If you are being harassed, or witness online harassment, block and flag the offending user and a moderator will take action. We do not tolerate harassment. This is an area of well-established rights, Librem Social is built on and with the expert policies of ACLU, FSF, and EFF, while avoiding the pitfalls of ham-fisted censorship we all dislike from Big Tech."

And the link to their Code of Conduct is here: https://librem.one/conduct/

Some elements of the Mastodon community are a bit... extreme in their views on moderation, but it doesn't seem like Purism is going outside the standard faire here.

>The "main" mastodon.social instance

mastodon.social isn't even the largest mastodon instance[0]. Even aside from that The majority of active accounts are hosted on small or personal instances, especially for English speaking accounts.

>extreme in their views on moderation

IIRC instance admins had an issue with the purism instance not actively going against hate-speech. I'd hardly call that extremist.

[0]From https://instances.social/list

Instance Users

DOWN pawoo.net 549417

DOWN mastodon.social 321500

DOWN mstdn.jp 191718

UP switter.at 118232

It isn't extreme, statistically speaking, but at least it isn't what I would want in a social network. If I wanted a heavily censored network I would just use Twitter.

>it doesn't seem like Purism is going outside the standard faire here.

This isn't true. Most online communities at least ban outright bigotry and the Librem CoC does not. Banning harassment isn't the same thing.

> Warning: it's a Mastodon instance whose management seems willing to tolerate speech that most of the rest of the Fediverse finds objectionable.

All right, so there is at least one good reason to use it over other instances.

I sounds like Gab and LS could be federated, so these communities could become very large.

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