this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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But we need to convince people to care about freedom too. There will always be some excuse to not use the freedom respecting alternative. Look at Reddit users. They could all join us here and change something, but they don't care. Same with Twitter, Windows, etc. It's always difficult, it's always annoying. But if we spread the message and help people with their issues, we can convince at least some of them.
Software takes time to improve. Matrix is a complicated project and unlike Discord it's also federated. It's possible that some things will always be harder with Matrix. But even if it improves a lot (which will probably take years), people might find other excuses to not use it. For example Discord might still be more popular.
I know Matrix takes effort to use. You have to understand what a homeserver is, how fediverse works, etc. I had to go through even more effort to set up my own server. It was difficult and took a lot of time of reading the documentation and tutorials. Some of the problems I had were ridiculous. Then to get people to use my server, I had to guide them step by step on how to create an account, because you can't just send them an invite link.
But we can't just give up on our freedom and privacy. We are aware of Matrix's issues and they won't be fixed in a month or even a year. In the future Discord will have even more users and it will be even harder to escape it. So there is no reason to wait, we have to fight this battle now. This is the right thing to do.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and Ian starting to feel like the situation we are in feels impossible partially because of the way we have let capitalism define what we call “friction” in apps.
Friction as a concept can do a lot of good in getting developers to be laser focused on how it actually feels to use a software as a human, but also… does Lemmy cause “friction” for new users because they simply cannot physically imagine a social network outside the context of a massive corporation?
Discord is undoubtedly very slick to use but no one can convince me that Discord, Bluesky, Threads etc… don’t have a huge advantage in being low “friction” from being imaginable by the average person.
We need to start differentiating between the shitty kind of friction that needlessly pushes away users and frustrates them and generative friction where the difficulty of getting someone to use something is an expression of traction where a broader invitation to think more radically about what is possible in community organization can happen. Seen from this light onboarding someone onto Lemmy is a million times harder than onboarding someone onto Discord, but that is because onboarding someone onto Lemmy is actually doing something far more difficult and meaningful.
Getting someone to try Lemmy who before wouldn’t have tried it (or hadn’t even heard of it) expands the realm of what is possible in that person’s mind. It isn’t fair to expect that to magically happen with less friction than shuffling people onto yet another corporate social media service in the honeymoon phase where there aren’t many ads and things are artificially cheap…. If the situation is the same, and your onboarding has done no work on the system, it damn well better be easy.
I mean, not all books should be difficult or challenging works of literature, but if your objective is to be genuinely changed by a book than you can’t really expect to get there without friction between you and the book. A frictionless book that just glides through you has no purchase to enact a genuine change in the fabric of your mind.
Should we not think of social media community building in a similar light? Yes there are annoying works of literature that seem purposefully obtuse (bad friction) but by the same token it is the challenging books that actually transform our minds.
Even if that one person you get to try Lemmy only tries it briefly and then just drifts off, you have fundamentally changed what that person thinks can be possible in the realm of online communities and that is no small victory even if it is harder to quantify.
The problem is that people don't care about freedom, security or privacy. If they cared, they would only choose software that gives them those things. They would use Free Software. Even when it's not always convenient.
So the issue here is not capitalism, but non-free proprietary software, because it makes it easy to abuse users. Unfortunately most people haven't even heard of Free Software. They don't realise that they deserve certain rights when using computers. I think if more people were familiar with the Free Software movement, they would think differently and they would demand freedom. Not all Lemmy users have heard of Free Software, but many of us understand that freedom is important. So we use it, even though it's not convenient and the UI sucks.
We are capable of competing with corporations and often making better software that them, but that's not enough. If people don't understand the issues we are trying to solve, they will just use whatever new shiny app that comes out next. That's why some Twitter users migrated to Bluesky and Threads. They don't understand that after a while they will be abused the same way as before.
Even if we make Matrix way better, Discord users will still use Discord, because to them everything is fine and there is no reason to switch. Learning to use something new is always inconvenient. I doubt that all Windows users are unable to switch to GNU/Linux. They just don't think it's worth the effort, because to them there is nothing wrong. Being spied on and restricted is ok as long as all their proprietary games work.
The reason people don't understand the issues you are trying to solve is because yall that think like this in the free software movement won't talk about the issues in terms of a broader political context that is actually relevant to normal people, in a language they are going to understand. Too many prominent people in FOSS just want to create these weird libertarian fantasies centered on technical problems and technical solutions without stepping back and recognizing the inherently socialist thrust of free software and the power that comes from speaking directly to the broader public about software in those terms.
So long as libertarian style ideology in FOSS fumbles around with trying to reinvent the wheel from first principles while socialists, unions and leftists exasperatedly gesture at the already existing wheels all around them, FOSS will always be a marginal movement of hobbyists without real political power to enact change in the realm of software and improve the lives of everybody not just extremely technologically literate people.
If you try to sell the FOSS movement like you are, as a clever technical licensing method to give users more freedom over how they use their particular niche software, and don't connect these struggles in software to a broader class struggle or a related critique of why capitalism is so awful at creating tools and utilities we can rely on, than FOSS will always be an obscure island the broader public could care less about.
I don't understand what fantasies you are talking about. We just want people to have freedom when using computers. Freedom that they deserve and that nobody should be able to take away from them. As a side effect we also get privacy and security and a society that works together to achieve common goals in a way that benefits us all. Those problems affect everyone who uses a computer.
The Free Software movement is 40 years old and it has already changed the world. It benefits everyone, not just technical people. Are you gonna tell me that all users of Firefox, Libre Office, Gimp, Matrix or Signal are only technical people? You are talking to me right now using Free Software and I'm responding to you on my fully Free Software operating system.
Free Software is not a licensing method. Software has to use licenses, because that's how copyright works. It doesn't give users any rights by default. Software should be free (as in freedom - we are not talking about price) by default, but it isn't, so we have to use licenses. The Free Software that we use today was created under capitalism, so I don't see how capitalism prevents us from making useful software and working together on improving it. There are also many developers and companies that sell Free Software (they make commercial programs).
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Free Software
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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