I find most people start out with the aim of baking a cake, but end up making an onion in the end.
I find making a state machine diagram before actually implementing an app is a really good approach because it forces you to think through the failure cases up front. What often happens toherwise is that you end up focusing on the happy case, and then error handling ends up being bolted on as you discover failure cases in production. This article is a great read on the subject https://shopify.engineering/17488160-why-developers-should-be-force-fed-state-machines
I think that public forums should be publicly owned. These are essential social tools that allow us to have discussions with each other and shape our views and opinions. These forums must be operated in an open and transparent manner in a way that’s accountable to the public.
Privately owned platforms are neither neutral or unbiased. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned. When the content that a user produces does not fit with the interests of the platform it gets removed and communities end up being destroyed.
Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. The information collected about the users can reveal a lot more about the individual than most people realize. It’s possible for the owners of the platforms to identify users based on the address of the device they’re using, see their location, who they interact with, and so on. This creates a comprehensive profile of the person along with the network of individuals whom they interact with.
This information is shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities. It’s clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. While it can be useful to participate on such platforms in order to agitate, educate, and recruit comrades, they should not be seen as open forums.
Open source platforms provide a viable alternative to corporate social media. These platforms are developed on a non-profit basis and are hosted by volunteers across the globe. A growing number of such platforms are available today and millions of people are using them already.
From that perspective I think that open platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon should be the focus. Instead of all users having accounts on the same server, federated platforms have many servers that all talk to each other to create the network. If you have the technical expertise, it’s even possible to run your own.
One important aspect of the Fediverse is that it’s much harder to censor and manipulate content than it is with centralized networks such as Reddit and BlueSky. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries and jurisdictions.
Open platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads and popups.
Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook or Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.
On the other hand, a federated network that’s developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network.
Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it’s actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens.
Marxist theory states that in order to be free, the workers must own the means of production. This idea is directly applicable in the context of social media. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored by corporate interests.
No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it’s going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn’t suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.
On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they’re developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them.
It’s time for us to get serious about owning our tools and start using communication platforms built by the people and for the people.
That’s right, seize not freeze. :)
if that was the case then they would’ve hated Biden too
I definitely find that understanding what’s happening and why goes a long way towards removing anxiety and fear.
Following news from China where pretty much all the positive developments are happening today.
This right here is the actual reason libs hate Trump so much. He doesn’t try to put a fig leaf over the atrocities US commits, he just comes out and says we’re in Syria to take their oil.
for a time
it’s basically an open pardon for anything that might’ve happened since 2014 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/12/01/statement-from-president-joe-biden-11/
lol yeah he’s a middle aged crackhead
US continued to do business with the nazis well into the war, IBM is famously responsible for facilitating the holocaust. And of course, once the war ended the US promptly started internationalizing fascism as bulwark against communism https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/16/the-u-s-did-not-defeat-fascism-in-wwii-it-discretely-internationalized-it/
I love how libs are utterly incapable of discussing things without using Trump for framing. He’s also not pardoning drug offenses, he’s pardoning the whole Burisma thing which is at the very least a FARA violation. That’s why the pardon is sweeping from the start of 2014.
It is important to keep in mind that any software ends up being a living thing. Even if you know all the requirements up front, which you almost never do, they’re inevitably going to change down the road. Customers will want new features, business might pivot what they’re doing, and so on. It’s pretty much inevitable that the software will keep evolving. It’s key to recognize this and design things in modular fashion so you can evolve things in a sane way as the need for changes comes up. That said, I find you can start small and figure out what the MVP looks like, then go from there. You can draw out the bare minimum and then use that to interrogate the project manager to make sure it matches what they’re expecting.