111–120 of 259 posts
Before the site has given me any reason to join, it makes me choose between 7 virtually indistinguishable options of providers with subtle technical advantages and disadvantages. Ah, GNU projects. Never change.
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I always saw intellectual property rights as a hack to try and encourage the production of non-rivalrous goods. The scarcity is in some sense enforced and artificial, and there's a strong argument to be made that they aren't they aren't "natural" property rights in the same sense as you get with rivalrous goods. I think pro-capitalist (mostly libertarian) thought on this matter is divided.
> The scarcity is in some sense enforced and artificial The problem is, you can mount the very same argument even in the case of normal property rights. At the beginnings of capitalism, the scarcity was in fact enforced by means of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure . IMHO, most libertarians are used to idea normal property and take it for "natural", but not so in the "intellectual" world of ideas. It is partly…
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I don't see hosting myself as an advantage. In the end, all you do all day is to maintain all the tools and apps that you host yourself.
Not really. I've been running a Jabber server and a GNU Social node for about a year now and I can tell you it takes maybe 1 hour a week of my time for patching. I have automatic security updates enabled on both systems but I tend to login from time to time and do a dist-upgrade on them manually.
I run my own email, XMPP, various storage (git), few simple websites and a bunch of minor services. I tinker with those, like, maybe just an hour or two a year. When I feel like I want to tinker with stuff, or I learn that I need to update.
Oh, well, and I had a bad day once in ten years when the hardware failed. Luckily, that was just a PSU failure, so besides the outage while I had to get a new one it wasn't a big deal - didn't even had to touch the backups. And this only applies when you host it on your own hardware.
Otherwise, things just work.
Before the site has given me any reason to join, it makes me choose between 7 virtually indistinguishable options of providers with subtle technical advantages and disadvantages. Ah, GNU projects. Never change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. I've been running a Jabber server and a GNU Social node for about a year now and I can tell you it takes maybe 1 hour a week of my time for patching. I have automatic security updates enabled on both systems but I tend to login from time to time and do a dist-upgrade on them manually.
But that's only two services out of many. What about your mail server? What about your webserver where you host your personal website? What about your own git hosting? What about your own private slack-like service? If you follow the "host everything yourself" zealots consequently, all you do is maintain these services. Or you pay people to do that for you, which quickly gets more expensive than just paying for your…
If a person is good with software engineering and system administration, they don't need to pay more than few minute of their time once in a while, so SaaS are more expensive. I run various software that can be either used on subscription or self-hosted (like Sentry, GitLab CE or Drone) and my time investment in it was negligibly tiny (like... I find a deployment recipe, and run it, then check for the updates once in a while), compared to monetary fees of a hosted solution.
If a person can't do the very basic maintenance, then maintenance costs are very high (they either have to learn stuff or pay someone to do every tiny task), so SaaS probably wins there, and probably by a large margin.
Before the site has given me any reason to join, it makes me choose between 7 virtually indistinguishable options of providers with subtle technical advantages and disadvantages. Ah, GNU projects. Never change.
Reading the comments here it seems that people are missing the point by just joining one of those instances. It is not about just using some alternative to Twitter, the real advantage begins when you host it yourself so that you can own your own content and post whatever you want (not what some company wants you to) and (perhaps) syndicate to other services like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. I just gave a small tal…
GNU Social is similar in concept to the POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere) idea, isn't it?
what leaves me skeptic about these kind of alternative services like GNUSocial and Diaspora is not much when, if ever, or how they will be able to attract the necessary critical mass of users that makes them relevant. Instead, it what would happen after that. The main two questions I would be interested in would be: (1) do they scale to the size of, say, Twitter (~400M Daily Active Users, Facebook ~1B DAU)? (2) what…
For no particular reason I can determine, we've temporarily merged the cultural / social automation technology for personal friendships with fanboy relationships with social status signalling. Future systems are unlikely to be identical clones of past systems.
This seems usable for personal relationships. Quite possibly automation for fanboy relationships might be a totally different service and technology. Maybe in the future people won't do geolocated at all. Or maybe status signalling will go out of style in the larger culture.
Sometimes coincidences don't matter.
The rest of your argument is the eternal wheel of IT which never stops rotating between centralization and distribution. Much as we had mainframes in the past and have centralized social media today, the wheel will rotate thru yet another decentralized phase soon enough. It never stops rolling.
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I don't see hosting myself as an advantage. In the end, all you do all day is to maintain all the tools and apps that you host yourself.
I hope FreedomBox[0] takes off and makes it easy (as in 0 maintenance) to host these services. [0]: https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
Before the site has given me any reason to join, it makes me choose between 7 virtually indistinguishable options of providers with subtle technical advantages and disadvantages. Ah, GNU projects. Never change.