grx · HackerLangs

7 лет назадdiscuss

Wrote the same in another comment.. it's kinda brilliant but sad to watch at the same time. Microsoft's Github guys are geniuses if this is a part of a long-running EEE strategy. And people fall for it, because they have no principles and values, on which they decide what's good or damaging for Open Source.

grx

7 лет назадdiscuss

> This point is brought many times. Why use GitHub if we can host git repositories anywhere? (A: GitHub providers discovery). Why use GitHub PRs if we have mailing lists? (A: GitHub has better UX).

Using Github as a git repo hoster is okayish in the sense that it does not lock your code in. Using Github as a central management tool is problematic, but still manageable.

But this introduces money into the game, and it's dangerous. Github will be the gatekeeper for money flows. It's the same for Patreon, but Patreon has less incentives to lock the whole Open Source ecosystem into their products (Github: hosting, code, issues, PRs, pages with CNAMEs!, package registry and now financial transactions).

My bet is that due to the current state of the ecosystem, people will jump on it and forget that Microsoft is behind all of this. We need organisations which are forced to be open and collective to handle Open Source, not privately owned corporate.

grx

9 лет назадdiscuss

Problem could be that implementations for ad networks are notorious for tracking. You would need privacy sensitive, distributed ad networks as well.

grx

9 лет назадdiscuss

Thanks for your unpopular input!

  Well, the kicker is obvious: normal people who don't read HN can not. Facebook changed lives for people who "can not".

Agreed! Too many techies are out of touch with "normal" people. "We need to have our own infrastructure!", "Why are you not setting up your own mail server?!" Duh, it's not doable for people outside of the adminsphere!

  The payoff is always "a worse solution but you get to keep your privacy". 
  The reality is, almost nobody wants that 

  who will host it, who will support it, who will pay for it?

  I don't think that's changing anytime soon, because even if the minority 
  ("you and me") may be willing to pay for a substitute to buy out our own 
  privacy, most people won't, and then the whole point falls anyway, because 
  the solutions will obviously not integrate.

Agreed as well! But I don't completely follow your reasoning: I think it is our, the IT's, responsibility to build tools that anybody can use on rented infrastructure. You can automate almost everything nowadays, from bootstrapping the OS to installation of packages and administration via web interfaces. The key point is to keep control over generated data.

grx

9 лет назадdiscuss

Heh, nice reference.

Of course I am exaggerating. But IMO people vastly underestimate how similar their own behaviour is to other people. Meaning, if Facebook "knows" me since 12 years (!) it can very precisely categorize me into a group of people. And those other people do not leave Facebook but feed it more information.

grx

9 лет назадdiscuss

It's too late to join the Leaving Facebook party. If you were a regular user since 2005 and leave now, it does not make any difference anymore. The collected data about you is enough to interpolate your profile for the next decades.

Of course, decentralization is a valid point and it's really important to get people who are kinda "new" to social media on distributed platforms. Twitter is centralized as well and also tracks with buttons and scripts. We need critical masses for e.g. XMPP and OStatus platforms like Mastodon.

This of course also applies to mobile clients like WhatsApp.

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