The Opt Out Project
optoutproject.net
optoutproject.net
Getting the diverse, opinionated and variedly incentivised open source communities to agree on thinking as a unified "something" is like herding cats. But its high time that the desirability and existence of an "opt out" is recognized formally and that won't happen without large scale coherence.
Maybe even the notion "open source" is not longer helpful towards that end. Big tech has inflirtated and one way or another "sponsors" pretty much every major open source initiative.
The starting point is data sovereignty and privacy, but more fundamentally, what we need is agency in the use of information technologies.
And even if I do sufficiently contort my facial muscles to pronounce that word, it’s esoteric even for the nerdiest of audiences.
It’ll never fly.
"No, I will host or join OSS communities on closed proprietary platforms. Never again. No, I will not join your Discord. No, I will not participate in your subreddit. No, I will not follow your project updates on Twitter."
Matrix, Discourse, and Mastodon exist are are used very successfully by a number of high profile projects. They don't force me to use proprietary, inaccessible, insecure, Electron-ridden clients. They don't force me into draconian privacy policies. They don't force me to prop up VC-funded money pits that will eventually come back around to extract anything they can. They don't treat the closed edges of their platforms as moats by which they can, ooh yeah, build a user base and then eventually hinder the experience in order to extract their deserved profits.
These things matter but people are so short-sighted and forgetful that they just jump from proprietary platform (cough, password managers are another great example), and then inevitably have to jump ship again in N years. Maybe I'm the odd one, but I'd much rather invest a bit more upfront, and deal with UX growing pains, than keeping throwing my knowledge, time, overall investment into a pit that ends up burned by capitalism.
Also, I think hosting an OSS community in non-accessible, proprietary user-hostile platforms is more toxic than... pointing out the originating toxicity.
And GitHub is a great example. I'm tearing my hair out with obvious, obvious feature gaps that have been present for 2+ years, bugs that don't get any replies let alone fixes. And on top of it, GitHub has caused material harm to projects by COMPLETELEY REMOVING access to issues and PRs that later-banned users have commented in. There are entire, important issues and context completely gone now.
And I'm actively working on an alternative to GitHub actions and am looking at moving off GitHub literally this week.
Given the chronic underfunding of OSS projects, this is an absurd take. Whether something is OSS or not doesn’t mean it will have more or less bugs, and it doesn’t mean it will have the set of features you do or do not want.
What it concretely means is that the development of said project can be more aligned with its primary community. But it doesn’t really mean anything for its users.
GitHub is insanely good and has been a massive boon for OSS. Anyone denying this is out of their mind and I will not take them seriously.
I'm getting a bit frustrated. The proposition is really, despite how everyone wants to twist it, quite simple. I spend my life on OSS, I haven't had a paycheck in 5+ years. I'm sick and tired of pouring my expertise and knowledge and investment into platforms that I can't fix. I use closed-source firmware, and that's it. My "unfree" predicates for my NixOS machines contain nothing. That's by design after 25+ years of using computers and applying the same philosophy. I build software and adopt software for the long-term, and every time I break my "okay, this time" rule, I get burned. Case in point, the GitHub issues *that don't exist anymore because GH memory-holed them*
And yes, I spent less time moving my shit to sourcehut and getting CI going there than I did spending additional days working around GitHub. Obviously this isn't feasible for a large project overnight, but responsible projects are absolutely entertaining conversations about it.
It can work /for you/, in a vacuum, because you can selectively accept the tradeoffs. It also used to work for me! I've been in tech long enough to have been through what you're doing, and I have stopped doing it because at some point, it crippled my ability to effect change on the world.
And I'm not interested in living in my bubble of free software a la Stallman. I'm interested in making the bubble larger.
I can't do this from inside the bubble.
(Email me if you want to continue this convo and chat a bit, I'd be interested)
Aren't those more of the same? They contribute nothing that IRC and Usenet didn't have decades earlier. And I thought Discourse was an archetypal Electron app. I avoided it when I can, but I've had to use it a few times and hate it. Plenty of old fashioned forum software is much more usable.
Added: and oh, the opt out site is hosted on github! It says so right on the privacy page. Avoid proprietary whatever, by hosting with Microsoft.... smooth move, lol.
Edit: I see, I confused Electron with EmberJS, another bloaty JS framework. Discourse uses Ember, not Electron. Sorry about that, my bad.
In exchange, I get an OSS forum software, I can interact via email, and valuable OSS information is discoverable via Google. None of which applies to Discord, Twitter, etc.
[1]: https://domains.google.com/registrar/search?searchTerm=noiwi...
Discourse only "supports" 4 browsers. If you use any other browser you get the frankly ridiculous "upgrade your browser" message. Faking the user-agent shows that the software works just as well (or badly) on other browsers so this is just shoddy behaviour.
Discourse is slow, unwieldy and degrades to almost unusable with JS switched off. It's pretty much the worst forum software I have used. It is not an application to hold up as a shining beacon of what OSS can achieve, unfortunately.
Like a true divide between those who make hardware/software, and those that run it.
Like in the old days of the internet, where companies such as DEC made the equipment and universities and government agencies ran software on them.
Another approach is to ban all user tracking. We have to ask ourselves, do we really need those highly targeted ads? And do we really need this invisible force that nudges people to consume more in this age of climate worries? It's the same force that sucks people down these spirals of hurtful online content.
"Follow me on Twitter or Mastodon, or get my newsletter."
No, I'm not kidding, it's there. That is exactly why we come to this website to "opt out" of things, right?
Once products are so deeply woven into society that it is not possible to lead a normal life without them, they basically become common infrastructure/utilities. The solution is to regulate privacy requirements (like eg. the GDPR does) and pricing (where applicable).
I think of it more as a (group) messaging app.
It is not shoving any unsolicited content in my face, so I think it plays fairly nicely. If this were to change, I think there will be huge complaints and people would move elsewhere.
Yet we live in a world designed in such a way that the easiest thing is to do is giving away your data, throwing away your privacy, and giving a tiny minority of people enormous power over us.
Duckduckgo? Thats already more of the same. They made a deal with Microsoft for God's sake.