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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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There are free (both kinds) options to these problems if they can’t afford it—and that still isn’t an excuse to require all coms go thru US-based proprietary services with big privacy implications.
Although I‘m not a fan of the options either, the implications regarding the project are minimal and I wasnt talking about the money. Hosting communications platforms isnt easy. It requires the team to change their habits besides their already challenging tasks of producing usable software.
Being the change you want to see does not implicate money, it implicates you contacting them, talking about their reasons, convincing them the comfort loss of non big tech platforms is worth it and only them it becomes a question of money.
Contact how? When you cut yourself off from the FOSS com options to build FOSS projects, you are unwelcoming to those actually using the tools whose philosophy match your project—just not your communications for some reason. There isn’t a listed email address or a gateway or bridged room.
The few teeny, tiny projects I have, I welcome emails & XMPP chat for anyone that wishes to collaborate which doesn’t require anyone to create an account on any particular service.
For those still not getting it, it is as wild as saying you need to have a Facebook account to communicate to a project as these services are all on the same level of propriety & lacking in privacy.
You‘re barging into open doors mate. You should still accept that the best way of changing things is taking up responsibility. You can definitely open an issue regarding their communication choices and propose changes.
And again, they probably have an ongoing community on the existing platforms which means bridges will be necessary which means proprietary platforms will listen in on all convos on bridged platforms.
You cant make people do the thing you think is best. You can only help them.
You can’t just “open an issue” if you don’t have a Microsoft GitHub account or live in a region under US sanctions or censorship where you can’t get access to it. These are pillars of sand to build your community on that not only lack freedom for users, but access too & control for your own content + moderation.
Gateways don’t need to be the only answer too—even just mentioning an unofficial space lets those that don’t want their data harvest can hang out together under the same topic but away from those service (even if most of the chat log is public, unencrypted anyhow).
Developers of all folks should know better & know the issues caused by proprietary services. They should not plan for where users are now but where they want things no be in the future but there’s a myopic view of this is where the users are. They don’t even give folks a place to air grievances like you are suggesting.
Oh man… I don’t disagree completely but thats still not how this works.
Github alternatives are very early in their existence. Things like gitlab, forgejo and such are very limiting if you want to promote a new project.
Although you are technically right, your premise is much too strict. If you cant be asked to help people do the right thing, I dont think you‘re in the right place discussing foss things.
I can solely repeat what I said earlier: be the change you want to see. Help people do the right thing and stop bitching about all the things that unpaid volunteers are doing wrong in your opinion.