Sounds like a pretty good feature request XD by no means do I want to see lemmy be an exact copy of reddit, but you can follow people over there, and it seems a usefull thing to do.

My problem with masto is that it’s a pretty decent twitter replacement that I found while looking for a facebook replacement. I figured out two things real quick: I really didn’t want use anything similar to facebook after all, and while masto came a bit closer to what I’d wanted, in the five or six years I’ve used it since, I’ve become a master of cooking my thoughts down to 500 characters.

I don’t feel like it was a productive challenge; more often than not I came away feeling semi-muted.

I’ll call it the twitter limitation, because I know masto kind of inherited it.

I just found it limiting. Go figure :)

THAT SAID, the masto devs make really good software, without qualification.

This Is The Way.

This article seeks to normalize, trivialize and reduce to an offhand consideration a problem that is likely to be nearer and of much greater concern to us all than most would be inclined to think.

Wots the scoop, Chef?

oK, I will cheerfully admit that you weren’t imagining things; that said, I think the masto devs have generally made at least the appearance of evil here, which is potentially as bad as just plain old evil.

Limiting access to FOSS is bad. Everyone involved in FOSS knows that. If they were going to do something like this, they could have at least kept it between themselves and their beta testers, and not made a point of telling everyone they had to be a patreon supporter to get access. Do they have an interest in the success of patreon? if not, what then is their motivation in using a selection metric so directly associated with their cash flow? At some point, they must understand that a donation is made voluntarily, and if you require a donation, now or previously - your software or service is simply not free, and you have been made to pay for it, and that payment is not a donation but a charge.

For the record, I’m not overly invested in your opinion of me. I’m simply sharing my views. I respect your right to differ with me ;)

Hey thanks, I will give that a look :)

Hmmmm, whatever floats your boat. I find it highly constraining, but I do like to go on. No doubt the result of a couple years of instruction in collegiate level English composition.

Also, it’s more a platform limitation (masto tries to go head to head with twitter) than anything,

In any case, the source of my actual butthurt with mastodon today is this thing they’re doing with the android beta. Where you have to be subscribed to their patreon to get it. Honestly, I dgaf about getting the android client; I hate my phone and it’s because of the handcuffed, bastardized linux it runs. However I am deeply committed to FOSS, having developed, tested and in fact made a living with it for decades. My beef isn’t that I think everything is supposed to be free, it’s that I think anything advertised as FOSS damn well better be free or they can anticipate hearing from those pf us who take Free and Open damned seriously. There are a million ways they can directly support themselves in developing mastodon without practically taking a segment of their user base hostage for the FOSS code.

That Is Not The Way.

This is not FOSS. This Is Not The Way.

Sure, just quit calling it free and open source software

Like it seems with many people right now, you clearly don’t understand what FOSS is.

Yeah but you are imagining their motives and predicating their future actions on the products of your imagination.

None of that is happening for any of those reasons. This makes any outcomes you anticipate, well, I’ll be kind and leave it at ‘unlikely’.

I think it’s one more incentive not to use mastodon.

Whats more is this: People who sign up to work on a FOSS project should have 0 anticipation, ZERO ANTICIPATION of being paid for their work on that project.

Start a consultancy around it? Sure. Charge to host instances? You bet. Combine those things with other value adds? Certainly. A patreon to facilitate a living while working on FOSS code? questionable. Insist on payment (that’s patreon, people) to push your FOSS contributions to the public? Sorry that is NOT FOSS.

Expect to be paid for FOSS contributions? Maybe you should look up the definition of FOSS, then maybe do something to experience the community. It’s about creating and donating value to the community, for the sake of that community, not self enrichment.

“Erode the US Dollar”

That’s been going on for some time. Both China and Russia have been quietly divesting themselves of the US Dollar for some years. It isn’t really news, but it makes great propaganda, because it’s true and relevant and can be disconnected from time in such a way that it can be leveraged as needed to show what a bunch of weak ass punks we Americans must surely be.

On a different note, that sword you’re yanking on is the still rooted tooth of a sleeping dragon.

WTF are you even on about

WAIT I THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO EXPRESS AN ACTUAL OPINION

Just another reason to bend us over at the cash register for a loaf of bread and a box of pasta.

Which is actually how ‘Linux’, in the common useage, is used.

Idk, but all the cool kids that started doing it are old

Really though, if you want to mark a proper line between them, Linux is the kernel+a certain few libraries, and nothing more.

At one time, almost everything else was GNU. A lot of code has been written since then by folks who neither recognize nor see a need for the distinction.

All that’s left at this point is politics.

My suggestion is 1. Stop being so fruitlessly pedantic and 2. Don’t worry about it. The statute of limitations has run out ;)

The solution is real simple, don’t turn to wikipedia on matters that are politically charged. Get your news from a news outlet, instead of expecting that a crowdsourced online encyclopaedia might be up on current events.

I came here to say 'Fuck Russia’s Govt"

and that I feel bad for the Russian people.