Buggy software, not so user friendly, things don’t work, new things to learn…
Sometimes you just wanna do a simple thing and you cannot do it and that really undermines your self esteem.
You try to find little working solutions when big techs with armies of engeneers and programmers are working against you.
Aurora store stopping to work, apps getting blocked on lineage os or rooted phones, Reddit cleaning out all those amazing third party apps, Linux that wanna make you destroy your pc at times, Firefox remaining the only real alternative to chromium (only god knows for how long yet), google wanting to DRM everything, ig blocking my account because i was using barinsta (i cannot even delete it), Newpipe getting stuck after 1/4 of the video.
Sometimes you find half of your software stops working and you need to go and understand why, fixing or checking for alternatives…
Is it possible that we have from one side mass tracking and surveilance and from the other a (sometimes understandibly quite not organized) series of freely mainteined software.
Can’t we just find a new way of monetize stuff without ads? So that we can build really nicely working software without all the shit that comes from the need of having to track the user? Are there real alternatives? We need to get organized and actually starting to build a better web and software, but i really think an economical incentive is still very much needed for it to be stable and usable by everyone.
Sorry this is more of a rant than a real post, sometimes everything really gets frustrating and you have to deal with much more serious shit in life that doesn’t leave time for checking out why your Newpipe, your gps or home server doesn’t work…
It is overwhelming. Just take it slow. Dont ban yourself from non open source things. Maybe try adopting one open source thing at a time
It helps if you can treat it as a hobby. My partner’s hobby is music, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do in one’s spare time. I always feel a bit weird when people ask me what I do in my own spare time and my answer is basically fixing my shit, then pushing it just hard enough that it breaks again.
To your question, the unfortunate reality is that those of us who care about privacy and software freedom are a small minority. Why overhaul your business model to suit us when they can continue to milk every other consumer out there who frankly doesn’t give a shit?
Phones are, of course, the worst of all for this. People do great work developing FOSS solutions but it is an uphill struggle and I worry that the hill is getting steeper.
On the other hand, fixing all those problems makes you a really effective problem solver. You learn which technologies are good and which are bad; you learn where to find reliable solutions to problems; and you begin to see where tutorial writers have a lack of knowledge (or were really lazy) and how to fix their problems. It forces you to create good habits and to follow best practices. And years down the line, you’ll have some great, stable software that is the envy of your techie friends.
There is one good example of a good FOSS project with reliable funding and a thriving community, which is blender.
You know why blender is a success unlike other projects . Because it a very complicated piece of software that most of the community can’t just fork or start another project. so for FOSS projects to thrive they need more convergence of developpers to the same project . rather than divergence of efforts into multiple of projects. I know that this is not how FOSS works. but the reality is that without an urge to devellop projects in rivalary with the commercial ones. the resulting quality will always be mediocre.
another problem is the lack of proper documentation, It it very hard and time consuming to get familiarised with complex project codes. many of them are lacking proper documentation to encouraged newer devs to join in. the reality is that this takes time away from coding into documentation, but its an important ressource to encourage growth and participtation.
There is no ethical way to monetize software because the unethical thing is capitalism itself.
Also, all the arguments for market economies being useful and the typical supply/demand arguments completely break down for a product which is infinitely duplicatable for free
Yes, hence the constant efforts to create and enforce artificial scarcity, from DRM to NFTs.
And it’s not just software. The same ideology leads to locked dumpsters full of food behind grocery stores and shoes and coats cut open before they’re thrown away at the end of the season.
