Re: Diversification [ branched from Re: conflicts in the gnu project now affect guile]

[Zelphir Kaltstahl <zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de>]

On 10/26/19 1:26 PM, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 11:03:12AM +0200, pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 10:14:22AM +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> [...]
>
>>> only become aware of that when you try to live at the rift.
>> Yes, this is something we should keep in mind.  IMHO the medium should
>> remain a mailing list and this should be clear.  Top posting is
>> useless and undesirable with both e-mail and forums though, I believe.
>>
>> Since I use mutt too, I think plain text compatibility is important.
> See? There lies the problem. I'm firmly in your "camp", and still I
> learnt to realise that the other "cultures" do have as difficult a
> time to adapt to "our" camp as the other way around.
>
> That's why I believe that we need serious thinking (beyond the "easy"
> technical things) and lots of tolerance.
>
> To me, Wikipedia is a wonderful inspirational example for a web site
> which succeds in bridging an astonishly broad swath of those "cultures"
> (and still doesn't cover all of them, it has a distinct academic and
> "liberal", in the broadest sense, "smell" to it).
>
>> As for the formatting, I think for plain text e-mail compatibility,
>> when there are stars around a word, it should *not* be highlighted as
>> italic.
> Uh -- isn't the star reserved for *strong*? ;-)
>
> Cheers
> -- tomás

Hi!

Well, I hope that such tolerance does not lead us to accept usage of
mini-uglyfied proprietary JavaScript or other bad things, just to please
people, who in the majority most likely …

(1) … would never consider switching away from _their_ medium of choice,
because most people use it, so it must be right
(2) … have never even thought about the consequences of their choice of
technology (examples here are the web engine monoculture threat and
human interaction via Whatsapp and FB messenger, Skype)

I just want to point that out. While I find it to be a good idea to be
open to alternatives, I do not find it acceptable to not stay true to
our principles as a community of free software developers.

I also often see a very heavy imbalance between the amount of thought
some people in the free software world have put into their choice of
technology and the amount of thought the mainstream user has put into
their choice (usually zero, besides an "Oh it works!" or "It does not
cost me money!"). So we should not give up our principles, in order to
win some people over, because then we are actually the ones "won over"
(or lost) to the proprietary non-free world. It would not be a
diversification, but a disintegration of our community.

That said, I am open to trying out any community communication
technology, that follows the principles of free software and is run in
an ethically acceptable way.

I am highly skeptical of discourse, because:

* https://www.discourse.org/ tries to load Google Analytics and
fontawesome, 2 tools to spy on users. They already do not seem to care
about privacy.
* It is very JavaScript heavy.
* In my experience slow and sluggish.
* WYSIWYG-Editor – These tend to not produce plain text well readable
documents. Just give me some simple editor, Markdown maybe, not mandatory.

That is, why I like the idea of having a good old (newly written in
Guile) forum software. I would like and welcome such a forum software,
because some of my best memories of community interaction happened in
such a good old forum with a great community. It is also a great
structured long term memory. Whether the "other cultures" would use it
is on a different sheet of paper.

One more thing we should very much look out for, when choosing some
technology or when making our own software is:

* Can we actually get all our content out of that software if needed?
Can we export it to some JSON or other useful format?

Otherwise we will lock ourselves in.

Best regards,

Zelphir