There should be a law that any time someone uses the word slam in a news context it should be about someone literally being slammed.

This is proprietary (and running in a web browser does not make it less so)

The problem is the works they didn’t pay for. “Copyright infringement” is quite the anodyne term for “theft.”

Other way around. Copyright infringement is the alleged crime. “Theft” is the entertainment industry’s spin term for it. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Theft It is best to call things what they are and not buy into this silly narrative.

This

I’ve been very outspoken about my non-belief in intellectual property; I don’t think reading information or making a copy of it is stealing it. On the flipside, these bots are effectively performing a denial-of-service attack on public infrastructure, wasting computing resources, bandwidth, and time that is finite. The internet is for humans first and bots second; I don’t care about bots so much as long as they are well-behaved, which these are not.

My own instance went under several weeks back, then I installed Anubis and suddenly it’s usable again.

Intellectual property is imaginary and making a copy of something isn’t stealing it. In contrast, Disney actually has contributed to something which could more easily be likened to theft - namely, strangling of the public domain (after helping itself generously to public domain stories and characters).

I don’t like Midjourney as it’s a proprietary service-as-a-software-substitute, but Disney actually is the greater evil here. It’s probably worth noting that Disney didn’t actually create the vast majority of characters at issue here.

Pidgin is still around, and you can even use discord with it (no voice, mind you).

I would like to bring the multi-platform client back.

open source, but not free

Free here means free-as-in-freedom. The free software definition and open source definition are almost identical, there are very few apps that are only one or the other.

It’s the free software movement, though - the four freedoms are literally the cornerstone of the movement. They’re not simply a “nice to have” they’re the bare minimum of what we should ask for. If we promote non-free “alternatives” we are saying that these basic freedoms are not an expectation, but are optional and negotiable - we are moving the message away from the four freedoms and towards “evil” proprietary applications, while making exceptions for the “lesser evil” ones.

When I say Obsidian is non-free I am not saying Obsidian is evil or you are not allowed to use it. As non-free apps go Obsidian is probably one of the least-worst, as you and many others point out it is just a markdown editor so there is no vendor lock in or weird proprietary format. I am simply saying, this is a movement focused on “the four freedoms” and Obsidian does not meet those four very basic criteria.

Proprietary software is proprietary no matter how “nice” it is. It should not be advertised in FOSS communities and falsely presenting it as “FOSS adjacent” is harmful to the movement IMO.

There are many places so called “good proprietary apps” can be promoted and discussed.

Thank you for standing up for the free software definition. As someone who has been heavily critical of fauxpen source licenses including FUTO it’s refreshing to see moderators taking a stance against it.

The main concern I have with this attempt (by FUTO and other organizations trying to “fix” open source) is that watering down the open source and free software definitions causes damage to the community/movement. Whether the FUTO EULA or any other proprietary license is “good enough” for an individual user is not the question (and I have even seen people argue in favor of fully-proprietary blob software on the basis of being “privacy friendly”); real free software disadvantages rightsholders in favor of users and communities, which is important in case those rightsholders go defunct or rogue.

I try to assume good faith as well but I am seriously considering the idea that FUTO is astroturfing free software spaces to promote its version of open source. Despite publicly backing down on their openwashing attempt Eron Wolf-in-sheeps-clothing seems very determined that open source is broken and needs fixing.

This article is clearly about beans, not onions.

But they told me I can just not connect it to the internet and it’ll be just like any dumb device.

Eventually these things will come with modems built in so you can’t even do that.

“purple-discord” is the only free software Discord client I know about. It is a plugin for Pidgin and other libpurple based messengers such as Bitlbee.

“rdircd” the “reliable Discord client IRC daemon” might be an alternative but I’ve never used it.

Neither of these run out of the box on mobile but you can run them on a server you control, or maybe you could run them under Termux (have never tried this).

You can also use a Matrix or IRC bridge if you control the Discord “server.”

I don’t count client mods or web wrappers as they are fundamentally coupled to the proprietary client.

Discord is a proprietary centralized service that is hostile to privacy and third-party clients.

People are recommending the proprietary FUTO voice app. This app, and other FUTO apps like Greyjay, are non-free.

https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/10/18/grayjay-is-not-open-source/

It is in fact non-free. (The article is about Grayjay, a product from the same company that uses the same license)

xfce. For me, it strikes that perfect balance between lightweight and featureful, looks good but not too fancy, is customizable and usable. I set it up the way I like it and it never changes on me.

In the context of the software freedom movement, the fundamental pillars are the four freedoms - to use, share, modify, and share modified copies. It’s never been about price and we even say that selling free software is okay.

It’s a common misconception about the free software movement to say we’re against “developers making money” when we’re really just about computer users having the four freedoms. We just argue that those four freedoms come before the developer’s business model.

Well, yes, the end products of GAFAM aren’t designed to respect users’ freedom, but rather to control them. That doesn’t mean we can’t extract the good parts of what they do and create user-respecting alternatives. Standard Android sucks but we have LineageOS and GrapheneOS, for example.

A tool, like any human creation, is imbued with the agenda of its creators. The freedom to share and modify the tool is what allows the community to override the initial creator’s agenda. If free software comes with tracking malware the community will create a version without it. The community thus acts as a check against the power of the core developers.

This is why I’m against blindly rejecting anything that GAFAM has contributed to, as long as there is a freedom-respecting community version available.

No, this is a common misconception. F has always stood for Free as in freedom. No part of FOSS or FLOSS refers to price.

This confusion is one of the reasons why the term FOSS or FLOSS is problematic.