You say open source, but you link to the Open Source Initiative. The OSI has their own standards and ideas of what open source is, they call their standard the Open Source Definition. And as I said, such discussion restrictions would make sense on an OSI/OSD community, but that is not an OSI/OSD community. And it is not THE definition of open source, which is a vague undefined term which simply refers to source that is available and possibly modifiable. This is how dictionaries, wikipedia, etc define it. It’s very broad. There are a million “open source” licenses that don’t fall within the OSI guidelines, which means there are many many different ideas of what open source means. It’s the whole point of contention in the Free Software / Open Source debate that has been going on for decades.

The FSF has a list of licenses, but they specifically label the non-free ones and state they shouldn’t be called free software.

That’s why I made the example. Because they have defined their idea of the terms Free Software and Non-Free. But they don’t not call it open source. You can even see it in this post:

First, some open source licenses are too restrictive, so they do not qualify as free licenses. For example, Open Watcom is nonfree because its license does not allow making a modified version and using it privately.

Even they don’t refuse to call it open source. They simply say the restrictions of the “open source license” don’t meet their personal criteria for Free Software (which they define). Just like how OSI can say some open source license doesn’t meet their criteria for their Open Source Definition. They simply list licenses that “comply with the Open Source Definition”, so even they acknowledge not all “open source” licenses meet their criteria. (which, by the way, has to go through their review process to comply with and be listed under the Open Source Definition… so you could write a license that meets all their criteria, but it not be considered complying with the OSD because it didn’t go through their review process - does that mean it’s not open source?)

The OSD is different from open source. As I said, these restrictions would make sense in an OSI or OSD community, but it’s an open source community. The sidebar says “Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology”. If they want a more restrictive discussion they should use an OSD/OSI community, or strictly limit the rules to the OSD definition (which is silly).

When an admin/mod says:

i totally agree that it is often preferable to allow misinformed comments to remain so that they can be refuted.

in the case of futo, though, i feel like there are often actually some bad-faith actors who just want to keep the discussion going…

And then just goes around deleting whatever posts they want (which don’t violate any of the rules) on a hunch, that’s just conspiracy and paranoia. And an abuse of power.

Personally, I’m far on the FSF side of software ideology. But even I’d be happy for people to use a slightly restrictive open source program if the other option is a proprietary, closed source, Google cloud reporting program. I’d be happy if people used source-available “open source” over that. I’d be happier the more copyleft it got. But I wouldn’t run around deleting every comment that doesn’t meet my FSF preference of open source. People have different needs and ideas. If one keyboard has the features people need and is more free, private, but has some restrictions on its open source license, and you remove that option/discussion, they will just stick with Google keyboard. It’s harmful. It could be their gateway to something better, an eventual change in philosophy. But by removing the option and discussion, you lessen those chances. You shrink the community, discussion, and the movement toward more freedom.

I think this would make sense in a Lemmy community that was OpenSourceInitiative who has a very specific set definition. But open source as a general idea is fairly open to interpretation. Some people think source-available is open source. I disagree, but that’s just my personal opinion. Now if something was closed source, that’s a very clear distinction.

I’ve seen communities die out over mods enforcing their personal definitions. The Linux subreddit and Lemmy Linux community had issues with this a few years ago where the mod was deleting comments of people talking about what fell outside of their idea that Linux discussion should be FLOSS-only (people discussing closed source apps that ran on Linux, etc).

I think deleting does more harm than good. It’s better for people to discuss when things are a problem so they can understand them better. The Free Software Foundation is way more strict as to their licensing ideas, but even they still discuss and have a page full of alternative licenses where they discuss some are better than others (and even a bad open source license is better than a non-open source license). They don’t ban the mention of conflicting ideas.

Deleting just leaves people confused (and in my case I would have appreciated knowing the issue instead of just seeing a thread full of deleted comments and remaining ignorant). And it does a greater harm because people casually searching on search engines or whatever won’t find any sort of discussion or push back.

Removed by mod

Earth is like a giant nut.

The dehumanizing attitude of the comments here sucks. Don’t be like them.

A lot of web software does this (Github and Gmail for example). I like it but always thought it could be abused.

Is this person suggesting that the landlord work enough to make up for the amount that it costs to house and provide for their tenants?

They phrased it in patronizing terms which is sure to get some upvotes or likes or whatever but when you think about it for more than a few seconds it doesn’t make any sense.

Couldn’t this always be done by the developer using their own CSS via GtkCssProvider?

This write-up feels a little too politically biased. But aside from that, it does seem like a disproportional use of funds for an organization that makes millions and whose primary goal is Linux. It would be nice to see a better breakdown of funding.

Fish is my favorite. I can barely do without it. Only downside is some bash commands don’t work on it without modification.

But I’m also having a ton of fun right now with xonsh which lets you use python and bash together.

Czkawka is a rewrite/improved version of FSlint written in Rust. It finds duplicate, broken, and excess files. And it can compare images and videos to find similar media. It uses Gtk (and Glade).

Edit: Oh, and RedoxOS is an entire GUI OS written in rust.

Sorry, I don’t personally have any experience programming Rust. But both of the projects I listed have pretty rapid development so I can’t imagine it’s insanely difficult. Then again maybe the devs are just coding geniuses. The guy that does Redox also works for System76 and a lot of their software is written in Rust.

Yep, it’s on F-Droid! And Gitlab under GPL3.

I downvote myself (or at least un-upvote myself) sometimes for a few reasons.

One, if I’ve made a mistake or been persuaded by another’s response.

Two, if I see another response that is better or more important than mine and I think theirs should be above mine (or mine below).

Stealth is another really nice Android client that is account-free for those who don’t want an account or to login but still want to subscribe and save posts locally.

With his setup, I’m amazed that anything is working at all. It’s impressive that it’s working as well as it is.

And yeah, the false expectations part. It’s a pitfall for most people. It would actually be really interesting to watch someone who only grew up using Linux try and switch to Windows. I wonder how much more or less confusing it would be to them. That would be a good way to compare what is a true problem and what is just expectations. Windows has tons of quirks and bad design that people have normalized and learned to live with and have become non issues.

That’s exactly why they’re doing it. To “protect the brands”. Brands don’t want bad press or for others to know that people are mad at them.

Brands include media and governments. Not only does it hide bad press and community consensus, it helps them control what the public sees and believes. It also further hides any sort of manipulation they’d like to do (either with vote counts, or with the recommendation algorithms).

It’s ok, now we can just rely on Google/YouTube to let us know what is or isn’t misinformation!

Stoned. Usually.

Purely conspiracy theory here, but this comes just after the reveal that the FBI tried to get user info. Maybe the FBI weren’t happy with the lack of records Signal were keeping and this is a compromise. We have seen this sort of thing before. Gov wants info, an extra closed layer is created. If it’s not this, the timing is unfortunate.

Anyway, the blog post is very vague. In all those paragraphs they don’t even mention how this new implementation works. Just that the way it works now isn’t enough. Maybe the interfaces they mention becoming public will help understand it better, but of course the code is closed and unreleased so we’ll never really know.

Vitamin C is part of the official NIH Covid-19 Guidelines.

You can’t just say “Just get the vaccine” and stop there. That’s the opposite of science. Anything that has any potential to help people should be studied. Especially in cases where the medicine is highly available and low cost for disadvantaged people around the world.

Also, lots of medications (including ivermectin) are addressed in the official guidelines.

I have zero interest in getting in an argument for what people should or shouldn’t take. But to constantly refer to ivermectin as a “horse dewormer” is disinformation of a different kind. It’s FUD. And it’s harmful. It’s a great drug for certain human conditions and to fear monger it could really have a negative effect on people who might actually need it for treatment.

When people were doing this with Hydroxychloroquine it made it very difficult to get. My mother legitimately needed it for her health treatment and because people kept using it as a political issue it made it very difficult.

So I think instead of vilifying people or medications that can be used to help people, just stick to the truth. There’s no consensus. There’s no harm in studying it. Talk to your Dr.