IninewCrow

So … what is the leading alternative browser then?

One of the reasons Firefox became so popular was that it was an alternative.

Now that they’re drifting towards something we don’t like … what is the new alternative?

Obviously, you know the rules and so do I

It works about a well as video editing capabilities from the start of the movie making era from the 1920s onwards. You can make a simple basic straight forward production that can be shared online. It makes great documentaries or just simple straight forward film production that doesn’t require any special effects.

They were able to make full featured films in the 1930s and 40s with far less editing capability. The only limitation is your ability to capture great images and content with your camera and video equipment.

Same here, I have a hard time budgeting most months but I do go out of my way to donate $20-$30-$40 a year to major projects or to sign on to $1-$2 a month contributions.

I think of it from the point of view that I won’t buy that hamburger this week and instead give the money to a developer instead.

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I’ll repeat my comment here to give it it’s own thread
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Nice idea but we shouldn’t associate open source software as “free software”. Yes it can be associated to freedom and freely available but it also suggests that no one ever has to pay for it.

This software even though it is freely available is not free of monetary cost. Someone has to pay for it either with their own money, their expertise or their time … all of which cost people money.

It becomes a whole different level of cost when it comes to open source social media. You need people to run the software, maintain the software, update the software, secure the software … then throw in servers, routing, security … and as instances grow in size you need more hardware, hardware upgrades, updates and people and organizations to maintain it all … at one point in the growth of open source social media, you start to need dedicated full time people to work at maintaining these things.

I’ve chatted with some instance owners and maintainers who say they don’t mind the work because it is limited at this time. Many of them are already professionals with well paying jobs and they don’t mind doing this on the side as a hobby or passion project. However the work is light at this time because there aren’t that many users and the communities are small. But over the past year I’ve noticed more and more instances changing and growing to accommodate a growing user base … it all ends up costing money.

So it isn’t totally “free”

A better and healthier way to see it is to call it “Open source” and remind every one that a critical thing that we should all understand in this new age of open source software is that crowd funding, sponsorship, contributions, donations should all be normalized by everyone who uses this software. And it doesn’t cost that much either. If every open source user just spent a dollar once in a while to the project or software that they used the most or liked the most, then it would add up to thousands of dollars for the developer. The same goes to instance owners and maintainers - we need to properly and regularly fund these guys to keep them all stable and working.

Personally I’ve been contributing for years to projects like Wikipedia, LibreOffice and GIMP … and over the past year or two I’m a small time regular contributor to the instance I use at Lemmy.ca

The danger with just calling it ‘free’ is in making everyone believe that no one has to pay for these services. The danger to not properly funding these projects is that eventually the costs have to be taken up by someone and that is usually the developers themselves or the maintainers or managers. And as popularity and user numbers grow, the costs only add up.

The problem comes when developers and managers have to figure out how to get more money to keep their project alive which is where corporate creep and advertising options start appearing. And also, as one platform becomes popular and becomes too expensive to maintain then it starts showing monetary value for corporations to take over. Corporate rot starts setting in when these projects are not properly funded and kept alive and developers or owners have to make the choice between being underfunded by their userbase … or making a bunch of money by selling out to a company or corporation.

We have to start normalizing funding, sponsorship, contributions and donations because that will protect our communities from being swallowed up by corporate interests in the future. If we don’t fund or pay for these things … some millionaire or billionaire will eventually come along to use their wealth at the cost of ownership and control and eventually lock up everything again behind a wall and a gate.

Nice idea but we shouldn’t associate open source software as “free software”. Yes it can be associated to freedom and freely available but it also suggests that no one ever has to pay for it.

This software even though it is freely available is not free of monetary cost. Someone has to pay for it either with their own money, their expertise or their time … all of which cost people money.

It becomes a whole different level of cost when it comes to open source social media. You need people to run the software, maintain the software, update the software, secure the software … then throw in servers, routing, security … and as instances grow in size you need more hardware, hardware upgrades, updates and people and organizations to maintain it all … at one point in the growth of open source social media, you start to need dedicated full time people to work at maintaining these things.

I’ve chatted with some instance owners and maintainers who say they don’t mind the work because it is limited at this time. Many of them are already professionals with well paying jobs and they don’t mind doing this on the side as a hobby or passion project. However the work is light at this time because there aren’t that many users and the communities are small. But over the past year I’ve noticed more and more instances changing and growing to accommodate a growing user base … it all ends up costing money.

So it isn’t totally “free”

A better and healthier way to see it is to call it “Open source” and remind every one that a critical thing that we should all understand in this new age of open source software is that crowd funding, sponsorship, contributions, donations should all be normalized by everyone who uses this software. And it doesn’t cost that much either. If every open source user just spent a dollar once in a while to the project or software that they used the most or liked the most, then it would add up to thousands of dollars for the developer. The same goes to instance owners and maintainers - we need to properly and regularly fund these guys to keep them all stable and working.

Personally I’ve been contributing for years to projects like Wikipedia, LibreOffice and GIMP … and over the past year or two I’m a small time regular contributor to the instance I use at Lemmy.ca

The danger with just calling it ‘free’ is in making everyone believe that no one has to pay for these services. The danger to not properly funding these projects is that eventually the costs have to be taken up by someone and that is usually the developers themselves or the maintainers or managers. And as popularity and user numbers grow, the costs only add up.

The problem comes when developers and managers have to figure out how to get more money to keep their project alive which is where corporate creep and advertising options start appearing. And also, as one platform becomes popular and becomes too expensive to maintain then it starts showing monetary value for corporations to take over. Corporate rot starts setting in when these projects are not properly funded and kept alive and developers or owners have to make the choice between being underfunded by their userbase … or making a bunch of money by selling out to a company or corporation.

We have to start normalizing funding, sponsorship, contributions and donations because that will protect our communities from being swallowed up by corporate interests in the future. If we don’t fund or pay for these things … some millionaire or billionaire will eventually come along to use their wealth at the cost of ownership and control and eventually lock up everything again behind a wall and a gate.

Just use Deepseek for US government data … what could go wrong?

Usually when a corporation has to say it … it usually means the opposite of what they just announced.

Think of it as someone’s private house or warehouse. Everyone is invited in to hang out and talk. At first there is a lot of freedom and no one is really affected. It becomes popular and there are many different types of people and open conversations are happening everywhere.

A new owner takes over the place.

He decides that some people shouldn’t be allowed to talk. He has a bunch of loud mouth obnoxious friends with extreme ideas and he starts giving them a louder voice. Anyone that disagrees or challenges them are drowned out, pushed to the back or told to leave. It’s become their place and their hang out now.

It’s not a public space and you really have no rights to anything there because it’s all privately owned by someone else. Write, share and save as much as you want there but none of it is really under your control or ownership.

You can shout, fight, disagree and challenge them all you want but it’s their place. You have no power there because if you put up too much of a fight, you’ll be pushed out, told to leave and never come back.

This is like listening to the abused house wife who keeps running back to the same unapologetic violent husband.

“He’s changed and won’t do it again”

“I believe in him … it’s going to be different this time”

“I’ll give him another chance … again”

“He promised that it will be different this time”

“I know it will work this time”

Whistleblowers always seem to conveniently commit suicide at the right moment.

I wondered about that too when I first saw it a year or so ago.

But apparently it’s an anonymous internet comment.

https://medium.com/incendiary/poverty-exists-because-the-rich-cannot-be-satisfied-c65a6119ab69

“Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.”

There is more than enough wealth in any nation and in the world in general to feed, provide health care, even education, shelter and opportunities to every living person on the planet. The problem is not a lack of resources or even limited resources … it’s an imbalance of power and wealth. A small group of individuals own and control everything while the rest of us struggle to maintain the little we have and a good number of us don’t even have that.

This isn’t a call to revolution or to ask everyone to violently swing to the complete opposite of the political spectrum. We have to create a world and society that is more balanced and equitable to everyone, everywhere … the poor have to be brought up to living standard that respects their lives and the ultra wealthy have to be brought down to earth to share the excesses they will never use or enjoy.

Education and wealth is known to lower population growth so there is no need to fear monger everyone into believing that we will eat the planet dry if everyone is able to afford a hamburger.

Think of the possibilities of humanity if everyone had an equal (or least a decent) chance of an education and to explore their potential? What do you think would happen to the world if we filled it with doctors, engineers, scientists, researchers, academics, professionals of all kinds of fields? Instead of trying to figure out how to build bigger more destructive, creative and terrible bombs or killing machines … we’d be building space stations to travel and colonize a planet or harness the power of the sun directly.

We have the potential but we keep getting held back by a small group of people who want to own the entire planet during our short inconsequential lives while the majority of us just accept that as completely acceptable and normal.

I keep saying every time I talk to my friends about AI development … we’re like trailer trash 17 year old parents that just gave birth to a genius baby who will grow up to be smarter, faster and stronger than us by the time it fully matures. We’ll teach it how to hate, to be short sighted, arrogant and want to make as much money as possible while disregarding every living thing and person on the planet.

A bit concerning that it is propped up on a night table and sitting right next to a doorway. There’s only two of us in the house but I would never place electronic equipment like that near a doorway where I myself could just knock it over (because I’ve done stuff like that in the past). Get it on the floor or on the opposite side of the room where no one including yourself can walk or move around near it.

Instead we use a worldwide network of interconnected computers and systems to micromanage everyone’s lives and convince them all that billionaires are good for the economy, infinite money is possible, immigrants are bad, global warming is not real, perpetual war is normal, no one landed on the moon, the earth is flat and nazis are OK.

It’s not so much that it’s AI generated … it’s also AI influenced.

I know so many professional office workers who once wrote some of the most boring sometimes stupid emails because they didn’t know how to write or get their message across or constantly miscommunicated things because they worded things wrong … now all of a sudden they’ve become professional writers and all their emails look like auto generated messages.

I’m guessing that many writers also take the AI shortcut. They get a bunch of content generated from an AI than just rewrite it for themselves. Some content i see is lazily edited and some is heavily. But I get the feeling that just about everyone is using it because it’s an easy way to get a bunch of work done without having to think too much.

Isn’t this basically how Taylor Swift got her start … her millionaire father just buying thousands of her debut album at the beginning.

It’s also a sign of things to come

We will reinforce our false and superficial ideas of the past or even present with the help of AI

All the vague uneducated and ill informed ideas we all have about anything and everything will all be magnified and exaggerated a hundred fold.