Software Freedom Conservancy

We're so happy to be back on the Fediverse (from a different instance)! ActivityPub and Mastodon provide a vital space and open standard for social media.

We decided to use @support to provide us with our own instance so we can use our own domain (and be in control of our data). It's so great to see that so many people on their own or shared instances. One of the great things about free software is the ability to host it yourself or have someone you trust do it for you.

We're curious, if you moved over from Twitter recently, if there was anything precipitating the migration away that could've prompted you to move before now?

In our ongoing mission to grow and represent both our community of software freedom activists, as well as the wider community of all technology users, we want to know how we improve.

Classically people have recommended the only way to truly trust your data sovereignty was to run the hardware, software and maintenance all by yourself. But this needlessly excludes people without the technical knowhow to do so.

What are ways we can make decentralized, privacy and rights focused software easier to use?

We also need to learn from this new influx of users about what they expect from their software.

How can we use this momentum to make other changes to peoples lives with the introduction of software freedom principles?

And how can we use this learning moment to build resilience for the next proprietary software crisis?
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@conservancy @support Nice! It would be cool to offer Conservancy member projects accounts on your server.

@conservancy

Recently I've been wondering if there exists something akin to the Google graveyard of products, but for single points of failure across the software ecosystem that have resulted in lots of disappointed users. Something like a catalog of history so that people can be reminded of the perilous nature of relying on things they have no control over. When I migrated instances relatively seamlessly on Mastodon I was even more reminded of this.

This is a very interesting idea! Something like identifying historical bubbles of failure so we could learn from them.
And agreed, migration with Mastodon has been a much easier process that if we designed system to have, could alleviate a lot of the stress and work of these consolidated options.

@conservancy @support I've been so excited to see the influx of people to the fediverse, but lots of the newcomers are very tech savvy and have known about the shortcomings of the birdsite for a long time. It seems like based on all of the bad stuff we've seen that we should just expect s to be coming around to muck things up. I so want to learn from this so that we can do better about getting people to care earlier and help start copyleft alternatives so there's somewhere else to go

@conservancy @support I just learned to use it as is and really like it.

@conservancy I think the long-game is hard to see. How does using something maybe worse, but certainly less popular, make any sense right now? Two sides can probably help.

On the negative side: As more and more bigger examples happen (Figma, Twitter, Adobe/Pantone, etc.) perhaps a catalogue plus testimonial of "what did closed doors take from you?" type question can highlight things that are lost (community, photos, etc.)

One the positive side...

@conservancy

One the positive side, people are not typically aware of how software freedom actually benefits them. Too abstract, philosophical, and technical. However, with a catalogue of big company failures and real people's pain in interviews, software freedom becomes an immediate, obvious, practical consideration.

Simultaneous with great failures are new questions that bring renewed interest, eyes, and development.

At present I wish this existed just for a "Why not Hive Social" post.