Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 98

@noorul a browser is an animal that likes to "glean leaves, bark, and green stems from plants ..." ;-P
http://www.animalbehavioronline.com/deerinsnow.html
@z428

This extremely prescient comment was made in 1998!

"Anything that reduces the prevalence and usefulness of cross-site linking is a direct attack on the founding principle of the Web." - Jakob Nielsen
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/fighting-linkrot/

@FarhanYusufzai Imagine an alternative history where the #HURD was finished before Linus got his kernel working, and the OS continued to be called GNU. But for some reason everyone uses the name "AT&T" for the BSD OS. To try to give due credit to those who did the work to bring about a libre version of AT&T's UNIX, some people call it BSD/AT&T. Would it be a good use of my time to try to make them conform to the more common naming convention?

@FarhanYusufzai you're entitled to your opinion. I think calling a whole OS by the name of its kernel and failing to give credit where credit is due is wrong and silly.

@msh are you familiar with Modern Monetary Theory? According to #MMT, the main purpose of collecting normal taxes is *not* to pay for government spending. On the contrary, government spending puts money into the economy, and taxation takes it out again. So running a deficit allows the (internal) economy to grow, and running a surplus forces it to shrink. This makes sense within an isolated national economy, but I'm still trying to nut out how it relates to a networked global economy.

@z428 sometimes when I'm trying to help people with their computer issues, I say something about the browser, and they look at me quizzically and say "what's a browser?" ;-P

@havlatobias when was the last time you tried Mate? I haven't had any such problems.

@stevenroose I'm not sure there's anyone who is concerned about the latter. It's definitely the former, along with the other #SoftwareFreedom issues many distros have (binary blobs in #Linux, other non-free components, repos of proprietary software turned on by default etc).
https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.en.html

@adfeno thanks :)

@FarhanYusufzai why?

@LWFlouisa absolutely. Corporate platforms have exploited a culture of collaborative creation and free sharing that emerged around early #commoning platforms, passing themselves off as being the same as community-orientated hosts like #SourceForge, #SlashDot, and #Wikipedia. It's a classic bait-and-switch.
@z428 @pootz

@stevenroose the only problem I find with alternativeto.net is that the lists it generates are not curated. So there's a lot of time wasted in testing 10 things to find the 2-3 that work well. What I like about sites like switching.social and fediverse.party, and #AwesomeLists, and stuff like that, is the *curation* that reduces avoidable testing time and frustration for end users.
@z428 @alcinnz @pootz

@RandomDamage in which case #OpenBox might be the sort of thing you're looking for. Have you tried that?
@tootbrute

@z428
> It's like the price for choosing freedom and privacy is, feature- and usability-wise, falling back to the early 2000s at least.

That's certainly the perception, but I really don't think it's the reality, at least not anymore. For example, I got a Windows 7 laptop for $50. It had a drawing pen, which worked fine when I put #Mint on it. AFAIK there's nothing an #iThing can do that I couldn't do on that laptop.
@alcinnz

@mike_hales have you thought about experimenting with a personal server using something like #FreedomBone? Maybe an old MacBook could be used for that.
http://freedombone.net/
@bob

@deathmlem Mate is definitely worth giving a try. But if you are using a device that can run MacOS, I expect you'd be able to run Cinnamon, which is even nicer.

@TheGibson the #ShortCircuit parallel occurred to me too. Also #RoboCop, the Moose is basically ED209. There's also a bit of #StarshipTroopers in there, which is hardly surprising given that was made by the same folks as Robocop. My favourite part of Chappie was where he asked his Maker why he would create him just to die. That's such a profound scene.
@genderlessmenace666 @remotenemesis @SetecAstronomy @alphakamp

In the digital age, people have a strong desire to use information technology to be informed about how powerful interests are screwing us all over, and support activism against that. #PR is hacking that to trick people into support activism in favour of powerful interests.

@LWFlouisa well, Discord is well known to be a social network for gamers, that just happens to take the form of a chat server. Not surprising you'd find a higher proportion of #Gamergate types there. I haven't spent much time on public #Mumble channels, but I've used it as a replacement for #Skype for voice conferences for activist tech projects. It's pretty good quality for that, and #FreeCode to boot.
https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble
@z428 @pootz