this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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libre
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Welcome to libre
A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.
The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.
Resources
- Free Software, Free Society provides an excellent primer in the origins and theory around free software and the GNU Project, the pioneers of the Free Software Movement.
- Switch to GNU/Linux! If you're still using Windows in
$CURRENT_YEAR, take Linux Mint for a spin. If you're ready to take the plunge, flock to Fedora! If you're a computer hobbyist and love DIY, use Arch, NixOS or the many, many other offerings out there.
- Those on Apple Silicon Macs can consult Asahi Linux for available options.
Rules
- Be on topic: Posts should be about free software and other hacktivst struggles. Topics about general tech news should be in the technology comm or programming comm. That doesn't mean all posts have to be serious though, memes are welcome!
- Avoid using misleading terms/speading misinformation: Here's a great article about what those words are. In short, try to avoid parroting common Techbro lingo and topics.
- Avoid being confrontational: People are in different stages of liberating their computing, focus on informing rather than accusing. Debatebro nonsense is not tolerated.
- All site-wide rules still apply
Artwork
- Xenia was meant to be an alternative to Tux and was created (licensed under CC0) by Alan Mackey in 1996.
- Comm icon (of Xenia the Linux mascot) was originally created by @ioletsgo
- Comm banner is a close up of "Dorlotons Degooglisons" by David Revoy (CC-BY 4.0) for Framasoft
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The FSF is ideologically incapable of implementing bot management strategies because they value internet anonymity. Bot evasion strategies are literally just advanced ways of being anonymous. You can't tell if a person is a bot or not without violating their anonymity or internet freedom.
Anubis is a modest compromise. It checks if you can run JavaScript and blocks those who can't. It's not perfect. It'll block elinks/lynx users or a real person using curl. But it'll also block any bot that doesn't use a browser, which accounts for most of the volume.
The "cryptomining" and "malware" comparisons against Anubis or hyperbolic but sort of true. Proof of Work is the dumbest and most wasteful possible strategy to combat bots. It's not the hashing that stops bots, its the check if they can run JavaScript that does.
Anubis has a new javascriptless metarefresh which uses HTML to refresh the page after a few seconds. This is a much better solution than the computational proof of work, in my opinion. This line from the docs though is perplexing:
The false positive rate will be the same as proof of work minus however many bots run headless browser with JavaScript disabled. Proof of Work doesn't give you positives or negatives, it's a flat tax.
nuh uh
yuh uh!
(I'm just fucking around now I'm too tired lol, it's 10 pm. But it does work on lynx!!!)
Just want to reiterate, I understand the concerns with Anubis, it's just that FSF makes me go