> keeping it up-to-date with its dependencies etc.
not if the software is functional today, and doesn't require interacting with third party systems (like this tinylittleoffice suite).
By the time the underlying infrastructure (like browser compatibility, or self-hosting OS becoming obsolete) fails, you're likely no longer using it anyway.
The "documents" seem exportable in text format, and in any case, potentially salvageable with another vibe-coded tool if such need arise.
Therefore, the original author is no required to maintain it.
That's a rosy eyed view. users running outdated code not getting security fixes are sweet honeypots for modern automated llm-backed mass exploitation machine long before something obviously fails for you.
you'll be spending tokens on getting it maintained, and if you don't spend enough you get pwned by guys who do. who exactly is winning in this scenario?
I am placing your time of digital fruition in the 00’s or later? Not bashing, but we bought floppies in the 80s with software with no updates. Cool kids got their software from Oh No More Warez + keygen in the early 90s. That went online in the late 90s.
Always online, internet of shit and perma update crap came at that same time, first for the OS and later for everything. Oh, plus two decades of using shady Russian software for virus scanning. Shit went up, update everything became everywhere and everyday. Plus gigabyte frameworks for functionality that was kilobytes before.
My point in cursing too much? (Sorry, mentally screaming FUD here.) That tiny code projects, even without an active maintainer, in the LLM-era are probably a lot more secure when run by the people they target (we run containers, and sandboxes, the cool kids run immutable distros). This is democratizing software, and it has the great feel of old.
Please everyone, vibe code tiny project with tiny codebases everyday. Dump them on GitHub in a free tier. Make so many that the people have a free choice again! And go watch Cliff Stoll again for that hacker energy!
OSS maintainedness should not at all be taken for granted. If you need something maintained by pros and security experts, that more accurately describes commercial software. FOSS as it stands, with the exception of some (but nowhere near all) major lynchpin projects, is done by volunteers in their spare time.
A lot of OSS gets supported by foundations, selling consulting or additional services, donations, maintainer's dayjobs, and people's pride in their work and desire to help
This is the part managerial and marketing types don't understand. Their expectation is usually that "since its a computer system (sic) the tech team will support it from now on".
patching dependencies correctly was one of the first agentic coding tasks llm solved 100%. you will need to dedicate a session once a year to to such patches. Or community of vibe coders will do it for you .
That has always been the case with anything self-hosted. Otherwise you're putting a lot of faith in an upstream maintainer to actually put in the effort which they may or may not be doing.
i guess they're in relatively separate spaces? that's how it's like in my local area in the UK
I'm finding that libraries in the UK outside of big cities are resembling those in the article, just nowhere near as popular, and with a more pedestrian book selection
Xcancel helps people migrate away from X, or simply stay outside of it. The fact that X is trying to shut them down, plus the fact that they silo replies and interactions in the first place, should be a good hint that X themselves don't regard that degree of openness to work in their favour.
It's pretty much the standard to either soft-block or hard- block access into silos. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, etc ... all do it. Of course it's an openly anti-consumer practice, but it's one they get away with when they're big enough to flip the service burden to the client.
how is it anti-consumer? Claiming you should be able to freely access the content on some service feels like claiming you should be able to walk into any fast-food place and help yourself to their soda machine.
A business is free to choose that you must login to access their content and you are free to choose not to do business with them if you don't like it. I generally chose the latter
Your analogy does not work since they can still show ads to logged-out users, nobody is getting anything for free. Meta even creates shadow-profiles of users without accounts to track them across the internet.
It's all about getting people locked into walled gardens. I wish the EU DMA had taken a harder stance on this and required all social media to federate to some extent.
You’re absolutely right. I can just choose to not participate. If I’m lucky enough, enough people realize that they have the agency to not give into this, but if they don’t it doesn’t affect me at all.
Either way, I don’t care. The Internet has become so hostile to users that the only moral and rational choice is to not participate on platforms that have become so hostile that threatening legal action is the only way that they can protect their relevancy in facilitating social discourse.
They are already de facto inside. Hence the argument to have a vote at least.
They are already paying the price for not being de jure members. (Currency exchange costs, rate hedging is also costly, and they don't benefit from EU unified foreign policy - the current Trump scare for Greenland could come for them too - hence the argument to join.)
which is obviously getting progressively reduced for the things that matter and more things moved to different forms of majority, and for good reasons too because the EU is already dysfunctional enough as is
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