

Freedom of information is freedom for the most powerful to use that information for their profit. The more powerful you are, the more tools you have to harness common goods for profit.


God forbid a technical person becomes an adult and starts understanding power, money, and politics. Engineers should be babies playing with their toys and being idealistic and irresponsible about their impact on the world.
I actually teach how to plan, execute, and assess political and social impact, beyond practicing it in my orgs. Are you aware there are plenty of disciplines working exactly on this? Your rethoric is just a way to justify your inaction. If nothing can change, it means you’re exempted from your responsibilities. Too easy.
Everything made by humans can be destroyed by humans. No social system is forever. The rest is just skill issue.


The Catholic Church uses “martyr” to define “innocent who didn’t fight, but were murdered unjustifiably”. For sure some nuance is missing, but it’s full of martyrs saints that just got killed because they were Christians.


You’re focusing too much on the WordPress example. There are a dozen tools mentioned in the article that will clarify what’s possible.


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A CMS is a specific type of no-code software. N8N or Appsmith are definitely not a CMS


Divestment organizers never really had a breakthrough in Microsoft like they did in other companies or organizations. Divestment is one of the best applications of worker power, but you need to build that power and Microsoft is very under-organized, especially in the US.


Futurism.com is garbage. I think it’s quite a distorted narrative: the vetting is extremely invasive, with regular face scans and passport verifications at sign up. Then maybe a lot of shit was still going through, but this narrative suggests that these companies are not at the forefront of extremely invasive worker surveillance, which is demonstrably false given the wave of class actions and privacy violation proceedings they are subject to.


There’s plenty of neo-nazis in the Free Software movement. It’s “Free Software”, not “Free People”


it’s source available, and most of the code is public, but you cannot contribute or fork


it’s not open source


Most people don’t study history. A lot of those that do, do want specific patterns to repeat.
Also humans don’t form their political positions through knowledge and reasoning, but primarily through relationships. If everybody around you is right-wing and you want to fit in, you’re going to be come right wing, rationalizing any knowledge of history you might have into supporting your right-wing position.
the logic that sending messages alters political reality is part of the overall problem. Politics is a conflict of forces, not a conflict of ideas or opinions. A license is as powerful as the will of the state power behind it to enforce it. Otherwise, it is powerless.
If you want to make sense of the political world, I invite to move beyond the idea of “taking stances” or expressing positions as a political act, and reason instead of what incentives and powers you’re altering with your political actions.
What you describe just does not play out in real life: neither on a micro scale nor on a macro scale.
The first line of the documentation is pretty clear: “Bonfire is an open-source framework for building federated digital spaces where people can gather, interact, and form communities online.”
You’re making this comment in a community named after a specific software ideology.
Inshallah