Mastodon already exists; it's just unpopular outside of small circles. People have already spoken with their time that they prefer hosted, "easy" solutions regardless of the evil they perpetuate (even if this preference is coming from a place of ignorance). The biggest question now is how to popularise it.
I just tried Mastodon yesterday. I was highly unimpressed with the on-boarding funnel and confusing UX.
I think one point people miss is, the social media market is highly competitive. All it takes is for Twitter's UX and on-boarding funnel to be 1% better than Mastodon's for Twitter to win.
Someone needs to provide decentralized social media platform without leaking the decentralization into the UX and on-boarding funnel and I've yet to see anyone do that to date.*
*I'm still looking so if anyone has anything for me to check out I'd be thrilled!
If a Mastodon server shuts down one day and everyone on it loses their accounts, they're likely to gather around one centralised set of servers.
There is a circle of trust too. For instance, the servers a server can trust not to propagate spam or content they dislike. This raises the barrier to entry and makes existing servers suspicious of any new servers which pop up.
The centralised option can also afford lawyers to deal with issues which inevitably crop up especially in the post-230 world we're headed towards.
I looked into Mastodon a bit but didn't quite understand it and saw clusters/servers for fringe groups that I didn't really want to be associated with.
Anti-monopoly legislation seems like a good starting place. Game console app stores are, at least in my opinion, equally exploitative, but Apple is one of the most problematic publishers out there. Being able to run whatever software you want on general purpose hardware isn't what this is about (although you should be able to, as the FSF has been saying for years). It's that Apple can't monopolise the market like this, so the government should be able to force them to allow competing app stores.
Apple has a monopoly on designing the features of it's products and on deciding who they do business with and on what terms, that's all. What other monopoly do they have?
Youre not actually answering my questions. Exactly what features should Apple, Samsung, Pinephone, etc be required to implement? How should we decide what products these new requirements should apply to? Who gets to specify those features and certify compliance?
I'd advocate for letting customers choose where they get their software after they've bought a device. Artificially coupling device and software repository increases switching cost, stifling competition.
I'm not a legislator, but I'd like to be able to run an app store of my choosing. I'd like to be able to use my general purpose computing device as a general purpose computer, instead of Apple's business connections deciding who I get to do business with. So far as not implementing features, if the bare tech were exposed, I'm sure people would be very happy to implement it outside of Apple. Just because they perpetuate the platform doesn't mean they should control how I use it. As to implementation (i.e. enforcement), that's just whataboutism because the government is more than capable of regulation.
I think this is where we get into the weeds. How do we specify what is a general purpose computer? How do we specify a legally mandated mechanism for installing software? I'm not expecting you to do so now obviously, but isn't the fact that it's so hard part of the problem? This is an incredibly tricky area to start legislating about. Theres much more to this to hitting Apple with a 'monopolist' stick.
This is why there are regulatory bodies and people's entire career devoted to this. The government can create regulatory bodies to answer these questions and then regulate companies.
I don’t think saying it’s someone else’s problem to sweat the details cuts it. It sounds too much to me like wanting to wave a magic wand to make the problem go away, but there is no magic wand. Never, in any of the debates I’ve had on this, any of the blog posts a I’ve read about it, even the EFF articles about this (and organisation I have enormous respect for), has anyone actually tackled this issue of saying how a law like this would work in any specific way and what devices it should or should not apply to, specifically.
But the parent comment was about neither genocide nor systemic racism. It was about corruption and how, despite it taking different paths in the US, it's equally reprehensible.
No, technical debt is a very general category that includes deliberate hacks, structural flaws, and small mistake bugs. It's anything that over time will damage the code base, duplications and wrong abstractions being very much included in that
You're welcome to your own definitions, but personally I keep bitrot, deferred maintenance, and "structural flaws" (which can be subjective and dependent on use cases and scale) out of the bucket of technical debt since it robs the metaphor of a defining aspect: intentionality. Debt is not something that happens passively as the world changes around you, it's something which you sign up for.
If you unintentionally destroy property and have to pay for it, you’re in debt.
We even have a concept of life debt.
Some debt is intentional, some incidental.
Most technical debt I’ve seen was not intentional, just a well meaning design that was created to serve a purpose that eventually outgrew it, and that’s when the interest started to pile up.
And happening passively is exactly what it does, interest rates change, your ability to make downpayments change. All part of the very well functioning metaphor in this context.
The components in modern electronics are interchangeable and have interfaces about as complex as a gear at worst but usually solderable components. The number of transistors is completely irrelevant because no one is servicing the individual transistors. If a CPU breaks, you replace it.
