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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 12th, 2024

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  • The article is pretty bad.

    It argues in bad faith against GitHub, conflates addressing the reader and their own community (suddenly “we …”), fails to see how despite not being FOSS you can be pro FOSS, names the vendor lock-in but fails to present advantages and disadvantages… I think the tone is pretty bad as well.

    For the most part, I dislike when projects and people self-host. It’s a barrier to me to read and participate. Different interface and UX, no account, different needs for registration, Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, unclear long-term stability.

    I like Forgejo and Codeberg. It has a good and well-known user interface, is fast to use, FOSS, and has a centralized platform., and is working on federation which could ease pain points of distributed and split hosting.

    I find SourceHut UI unstructured; very confusing.

    When GitLab came up, there was a time when I used it for my new projects, and moved some onto there, but eventually moved back to GitHub. Hosting it myself at work; self-hosting it is huge, heavy, bloated.

    The main reasons I still use GitHub are that it is free, feature-rich, fast, familiar, and one platform. I much prefer a low barrier to entry and uniform between projects as long as GitHub acts well enough, even if it is not FOSS itself.

    I would hate to see people follow this article and further spread out FOSS, increasing barriers to entry. I have left exploring projects and contributing because of that barrier on multiple occasions and projects.

    I’m hopeful for Codeberg and Forgejo. Codeberg can serve as a centralized platform already. Should Federation land, it can serve as a base for self-hosted instances, reducing many pain points of a heterogeneous and self-hosted-distributed field.


    Side story: When SourceForge became shit, I created and executed an issue ticket migration for a significant FOSS project. Thankfully we can change platforms like that when you’re not fully locked in but have accessible or natively distributable data.




  • I’ve always used aimp2, but my library broke file path metadata and the fixup tool fails to relocate them. I’ve looked at FOSS and free alternatives, and am not really, fully satisfied with any of them.

    IIRC, I found none of them sufficient. Strawberry, Clementine, Audacious, MusicBee; all have dissatisfactory UI / UI structure for me. Foobar is way too minimal. From my exploration, MusicBee was the most reasonable, acceptable for me. The customizable tab setup is a confusing mess too, but otherwise… I’ve been using that for a while.

    At some point I started implementing my own music player, making use of the BASS library like aimp2 does. But not much has come of that [yet?].

    Maybe I can recover my aimp2 metadata, and will switch back to that.









  • I felt strong aversion and irritation throughout, thinking they were unnecessarily making enemies.

    They certainly have an extreme view and goal. And are personally invested to the point of seeing fellow collaborators on FOSS as enemies(?) now.

    Putting up barriers through segmentation and alternative tech creates silos. To reach new people I don’t think we can get around meeting users where they are and what they are familiar with.

    Bring value through FOSS, and hint and nudge them. If you meet them where they are and bring them to your software it’s already one more than none. You don’t need to get them to make a huge leap into a whole ecosystem of alternative software at once.

    Their categorical dismissal of other’s opinions or priorities certainly felt irritating to me. Maybe they care more about FOSS license than UX or features, but why is that the only correct view in their eyes? Blind users may not even be able to use FOSS alternatives when they lack accessibility features or quality.

    Even as a contributor to a project I don’t want to use a supportive side platform only for that when it’s annoying or cumbersome. I very well may just skip it, or leave as a contributor.

    I would have been interested in the premise; why they think advocating and exclusively FOSS is the only correct view and thing to do. The lack of a strong basis also made all that followed more irritating.




  • The reasons for this shift in budget away from funding Free Software and the NGI initiative seems to be an allocation of more funds for AI, leaving internet infrastructure by the wayside. Meanwhile, the EC has thus far declined to comment to share its official reasoning for striking this funding from its budget.

    Investing into AI seems/feels more speculative and inefficient. I think you can get a lot more value by investing the same into actual, practical projects. Training AI, and training it well, is very expensive. And the gains or results are not necessarily even predictable, let alone certainly useful or used.