Gregory's Server10 Build something on a proprietary platform
20 Get pushed out by the platform's money grabbing stunt
30 Learn about awesome free and open platforms that could fill that need
40 Ignore all that and find new proprietary platform
50 goto 10
 21 comments
  @art you'd hope they'd get to 30, but most have no concept of foss and its sustainability.  @wilbr Could you image that? Paying good money for software and they don't even give you the source code.  35. Spend days trying to work out how to do even the most basic things because of the almost nonexistent documentation. 36. Be insulted on the help forums, and told you're just not smart enough to use the platform. ๐  @art The thing about "Ignore all that and find new proprietary platform" is that people have legitimate reasons. When the software people need doesn't work well on the open platform, or the other people they need to communicate with aren't on that platform, then the open platform is not useful. That's why people stick with Windows. Mastodon is not an exact replacement for Twitter. It has a lot of the same or better features. But the instance-blocking is frustrating for users. I just want an account I can post from, and not have to pay attention to whether my instance is blocked because of other users on the instance. I also want to follow some other accounts but their instances were blocked, because of other users. @rrwo @art yeah, I can definitely understand how an overly-aggressive instance admin could easily take instance-blocking too far. The idea is that itโs simple to transfer your account in its entirety to a new instance, right? Thatโs what you would want to do. Or host your own instance with your own rules I guess. But I donโt know, maybe instance blocking isnโt a good feature? The argument could be made both ways. @rrwo People stick with Windows due to the anticompetitive monopoly that was never remedied. A lot of people and organisations use Windows because they own software that only runs on Windows. And a lot of vendors only write software for Windows because there's very little demand for Linux. (Although Office-in-the-cloud actually makes it easier for people to move away from Windows.) People invest a lot of money and time into systems. That makes them very hesitant to switch to something else.  @art Funny, and sad. I saw this and didn't think X/Twitter vs Mastodon, but **Unity**. @art in fairness, FOSS alternatives rarely have feature parity with hugely popular proprietary corporate-backed software. Iโm not surprised people donโt want to move from Sony Vegas or Davinci resolve pro to Kdenlive. For us novice users, itโs fine. For a professional who uses every single tool in the toolbox, Iโd understand why kdenlive may just not cut it for them. (1/2) @art (2/2) I also believe that FOSS just struggles to advertise itself because it lacks the funding to do so. A neat idea for an organization would be one that assists in advertising for FOSS. Tricky to figure out how that would work though. Sure, but there are FOSS programs that are basically industry leaders, and plenty of other cases where a FOSS program can be a strict upgrade for someone's use case. For instance, VLC is a much more capable program than windows media player. But not everyone is willing to download VLC! Most people are just not interested in trying new things on their computer, and will only do so when it is an absolute necessity. |
@art I'm old enough and tired enough of the merry-go-round and just dangerous enough with a keyboard and an Objective-C compiler to replace line 40 with "say bugger it all, chug a bottle of codeine cough syrup and chase it with vodka, and roll your own out of the components that please you*, and erase line 50 entirely.