I’ve seen many threads suggesting products but they often don’t mention FOSS projects, which should always be preferred to corporate software. With FOSS you are already boycotting capitalism, on either side. Free and Open Source ignores borders and shouldn’t be categorized in nationalist terms, no matter where some of the maintainers happen to live.
FOSS is not American. Foss belongs to literally everyone.
I kept saying it all over the place regarding the fascistic rejection of Russian (as in race) code and got flamed as result. These people use FOSS, especially GNU/GPL software and yet they have no clue about the license themselves.
Weren’t Russian contributors (from very specific sanctioned companies) rejected from contributing because of US sanction laws and with Linux Foundation being HQ’d in the US?
I think that was mainly due to the concern of hostile actors committing code to the kernel.
Seeing people look for corporate social media alternatives is painful.
> “Hey guys, I want to leave X, should I go to Bluesky or Threads? What? Mastodon? Never heard of that. Looks very complicated, I’ll pass”
> – CEO, founder, IT wizz on LinkedInEvery time!
Or the classic “guys I am leaving WhatsApp, moved my whole family to Signal, another centralized US-based silo that requires phone numbers and runs on AWS, CloudFlare, etc.”
Signal: over a decade of leaking nothing and providing a great service for free, with some weird hiccups along the way like cryptocurrency.
Privacy “advocates”: fuck signal
- if they leaked something you wouldn’t know because US government law doesn’t allow them to disclose if they requested data.
- uses AWS servers that also the gov could ask for access to Amazon directly without even talking to Signal, being centralized and depending on AWS infra is also a weakness.
- needing phone numbers to register, often tied to passport and it is super easy to get your whole network when compromising 1 device
- all centralized services start nice, attracting users, once they have you, and money starts being a problem… meet: enshitification
i mean… it is massively better, but yes it still sucks. but what do you move friends and family to? last i looked into element it was not an option for several reasons, and i don’t think anyone would switch to basically noname apps like simplex or similar, even if they might be decent solutions. i really want the last few contacts i have on whatsapp to move, but i’m not gonna push hard to get them to use signal just to get it enshittified in the near future. also a few switched to telegram, which while not facebook, is not really better mainly because it doesn’t even e2ee by default.
What’s the reasons against Element :)? Currently testing it with some friends of mine, before trying to lure my family on it instead of iMessage. So would be interested in why you don’t think it’s feasible.
tons of reasons against element :
-huge/heavy interface on both web/software client
-2 passwords, 1 for session, 1 for encryption keys
-takes huge storage on server
-it’s the whatsapp of OSS
here it is :
https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp/
Free software is the antithesis of capitalism. It doesn’t make sense to boycott them.
lol who is suggesting boycotting foss projects?
I think OP means that one shouldn’t boycott FOSS projects just because they are from USA. That said, I don’t like to be told what I have to do and don’t agree to “FOSS projects, which should always be preferred to corporate software”. My pc, my LAN, my rules.
you seem to hold your individual freedoms high, there is a kind of software i think you’ll really like
You seem to wanting to school me about what my preference should be. I’ll happily block you. Bye.
Almost all the lists shared in the communities exclude FOSS projects.
From a purely “vote with your wallet” standpoint it doesn’t make sense, because there’s no money paid. However, one might worry about data/information getting in the hands of a fascist/compromised government. So I think people should judge this themselves case by case.
I think the important part is about who is running the server, rather than who made the software
The fediverse is interesting in that context because each instance can decide where they set up the infrastructure or how they process data / requests. The same applies to self hosting
I saw an article that outlined which country each fediverse platform “originated” from, such as Canada for Pixelfed and Germany for Mastodon. That’s fun to know about, but otherwise not important to users compared to the instances themselves
At most it might speak to which laws will govern the project itself, but even then someone can fork a project that goes astray
