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From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" <nemowiki@gmail.com>
To: Akira Urushibata <afu@wta.att.ne.jp>,
	libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
Subject: Re: Truth Social as an example of the limits of free software
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2023 19:06:52 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <fa9299e2-ba89-1e68-3de7-aef18705996b@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <2023.09.05.07.23.20.365212339@afu.wta.att.ne.jp>

Truth Social is a success story for free software.

People who could have been subjected to some proprietary software due to 
their interest in one certain celebrity are now using a (largely/mostly) 
free software service, thanks to Mastodon and the AGPL. They can benefit 
from years of development focused on community rather than advertisers. 
They can also benefit from external analysis of what we know about their 
variant of the code, which might be little but it's more than nothing.

You might discount those benefits as minimal, but they're not trivial 
and they're multiplied by the millions of people receiving them right now.

We don't know what's going to happen in the future, but thanks to free 
software (and open standards) the people have multiple possibilities. If 
some conflict arises, subcommunities might splinter and move to their 
own instances with lesser disruption. If the company fails and decides 
to discontinue the service, another service provider might take it over 
and make it better; users could even take matters in their hands with 
limited capital, thanks to lower costs.

You might consider this a distant possibility, or something you don't 
care about because you'd prefer the community to just vanish, but it has 
a non-zero probability. That reduces the centralised power of the 
current owners, even if just by a little, and that's certainly a good thing.

Federico

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  parent reply	other threads:[~2023-09-06 21:33 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2023-09-04 22:23 Truth Social as an example of the limits of free software Akira Urushibata
2023-09-05 22:46 ` Valentino Giudice
2023-09-06  7:06 ` Paul Sutton via libreplanet-discuss
2023-09-06 16:06 ` Federico Leva (Nemo) [this message]
2023-09-06 22:46 ` Abe Indoria
2023-09-08 19:27   ` Ole Aamot
2023-09-09 22:39   ` On gratitude and " Akira Urushibata
2023-09-11 16:47     ` Dennis Payne
2023-09-12  1:53       ` J.B. Nicholson
2023-09-18  0:01         ` Akira Urushibata
2023-09-19  0:37           ` Alexandre Oliva
2023-09-12  8:39       ` Ineiev

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