I like the premise of the site but the "The Opt Out Way to Use Email" even mentioning using LastPass despite their multiple breaches makes me question this site.
I think what needs to be appreciated is that the vast majority of people don't use any password manager. LastPass inspite of its many red-flags is still better than nothing, and is usually a good starting point for a less tech-savy person. Within the context of this site what needs to be accounted for is their target audience. If it's aimed at people new to the whole idea of cyber security then it makes sense, but if it's aimed at more experienced users then yes 100% LastPass is a terrible suggestion.
Sorry but this is terrible advice. LastPass had a huge breach with website data included along with many breaches over the past years. Please look into them further.
Why do you bother to write such a long, meaningless comment when other free/paid password managers are easily available? What's the point and what are you advocating for?
To me, the "casual blog post" format is a turn off, and I don't think the website is effective at all. Instead of random advice showing up in random posts that read like stories, the website needs simple, succinct and highly organized guides that people can easily follow.
I want "noiwillnot.com" and have it be a very simple site, with a list of offenders, and a I pledge/declaration:
"No, I will host or join OSS communities on closed proprietary platforms. Never again. No, I will not join your Discord. No, I will not participate in your subreddit. No, I will not follow your project updates on Twitter."
Matrix, Discourse, and Mastodon exist are are used very successfully by a number of high profile projects. They don't force me to use proprietary, inaccessible, insecure, Electron-ridden clients. They don't force me into draconian privacy policies. They don't force me to prop up VC-funded money pits that will eventually come back around to extract anything they can. They don't treat the closed edges of their platforms as moats by which they can, ooh yeah, build a user base and then eventually hinder the experience in order to extract their deserved profits.
These things matter but people are so short-sighted and forgetful that they just jump from proprietary platform (cough, password managers are another great example), and then inevitably have to jump ship again in N years. Maybe I'm the odd one, but I'd much rather invest a bit more upfront, and deal with UX growing pains, than keeping throwing my knowledge, time, overall investment into a pit that ends up burned by capitalism.
The other reply is correct. It's about raising awareness that these choices have consequences and motivating others to raise their voice about the importance of open platforms for building open communities and open software.
Also, I think hosting an OSS community in non-accessible, proprietary user-hostile platforms is more toxic than... pointing out the originating toxicity.
Maybe it’s just me… I like open platforms but I don’t see how they are important in the creation of open software. If it were, then why did GitHub accelerate collaboration and network effects for open source so much? Sometimes “free as in beer” is okay, and can serve a greater good. Sometimes demanding ideological purity can be counterproductive.
Well, for one I don't appreciate having to login to discord every single time Firefox restarts but Discord doesn't care to investigate my bugs reports. I don't appreciate that Discord bans accounts using third party clients. I don't appreciate that Discord refuses to invest in the Linux client remotely near enough (do they support Wayland yet? Screensharing across web and electron in Linux? Maybe, but it took them a year or more. And I don't appreciate an open source community holding important project knowledge in a place that can't be Googled..
And GitHub is a great example. I'm tearing my hair out with obvious, obvious feature gaps that have been present for 2+ years, bugs that don't get any replies let alone fixes. And on top of it, GitHub has caused material harm to projects by COMPLETELEY REMOVING access to issues and PRs that later-banned users have commented in. There are entire, important issues and context completely gone now.
And I'm actively working on an alternative to GitHub actions and am looking at moving off GitHub literally this week.
You make it sound like the OSS alternative to GitHub is something that offers the exact featureset you want, and includes the exact features that you are missing.
Given the chronic underfunding of OSS projects, this is an absurd take. Whether something is OSS or not doesn’t mean it will have more or less bugs, and it doesn’t mean it will have the set of features you do or do not want.
What it concretely means is that the development of said project can be more aligned with its primary community. But it doesn’t really mean anything for its users.
GitHub is insanely good and has been a massive boon for OSS. Anyone denying this is out of their mind and I will not take them seriously.
I have written patches for countless applications I use. I'm not denying GitHub is good or valuable, but luckily we live in a world of gray areas and nuance.
I'm getting a bit frustrated. The proposition is really, despite how everyone wants to twist it, quite simple. I spend my life on OSS, I haven't had a paycheck in 5+ years. I'm sick and tired of pouring my expertise and knowledge and investment into platforms that I can't fix. I use closed-source firmware, and that's it. My "unfree" predicates for my NixOS machines contain nothing. That's by design after 25+ years of using computers and applying the same philosophy. I build software and adopt software for the long-term, and every time I break my "okay, this time" rule, I get burned. Case in point, the GitHub issues *that don't exist anymore because GH memory-holed them*
And yes, I spent less time moving my shit to sourcehut and getting CI going there than I did spending additional days working around GitHub. Obviously this isn't feasible for a large project overnight, but responsible projects are absolutely entertaining conversations about it.
Power to you. I respect your stance, but as you said we live in a world of nuance, and this absolutism is incompatible with how the world works.
It can work /for you/, in a vacuum, because you can selectively accept the tradeoffs. It also used to work for me! I've been in tech long enough to have been through what you're doing, and I have stopped doing it because at some point, it crippled my ability to effect change on the world.
And I'm not interested in living in my bubble of free software a la Stallman. I'm interested in making the bubble larger.
I can't do this from inside the bubble.
(Email me if you want to continue this convo and chat a bit, I'd be interested)
I disagree, or don't care. I kinda of groan at people insisting hard to hear truths are toxic. I think it's ironic you protray this as a demand when I'm simply stating I'm not going to waste my time on toxic platforms.
> Matrix, Discourse, and Mastodon ... inaccessible, insecure, Electron-ridden clients.
Aren't those more of the same? They contribute nothing that IRC and Usenet didn't have decades earlier. And I thought Discourse was an archetypal Electron app. I avoided it when I can, but I've had to use it a few times and hate it. Plenty of old fashioned forum software is much more usable.
Added: and oh, the opt out site is hosted on github! It says so right on the privacy page. Avoid proprietary whatever, by hosting with Microsoft.... smooth move, lol.
Yes but Discourse uses Electron, I thought. Maybe I'm wrong and it's some other gamified bloatware instead, but it works out about the same way. No I don't want badges for posting. That's a Facebook thing, or similar.
Edit: I see, I confused Electron with EmberJS, another bloaty JS framework. Discourse uses Ember, not Electron. Sorry about that, my bad.
No, I think you're confused - not only does it not make sense for a web-app to itself use Electron, Discourse does not publish an Electron host, and I really can't imagine anyone using it if they did. Badges are easy to ignore, I'd argue they're a helluva lot less noisy than the Discord UX.
In exchange, I get an OSS forum software, I can interact via email, and valuable OSS information is discoverable via Google. None of which applies to Discord, Twitter, etc.
I don't use Discord or Twitter which afaik are walled gardens run by single centralized hosts. What I'm saying about Discourse (it looks like it is based on Ember, which I had confused with Electron) is that it is just another web BBS as far as I can see. Lots of other ones are out there and Discourse doesn't offer obvious advantages over ones with less bloat, or for that matter, over NNTP.
I don't think that point was conveyed, and I am not sure of the point still yet. NNTP with a web interface for the majority of users that have never heard of NNTP would be a perfectly fine solution. Arguably a better one, I agree. (Web ui means searchable via Google too)
I thought we were trying to get away from centralization, which includes Google, heh. Anyway Google indexed usenet for a long time. Idk if they still do, even through Groups.
Matrix and Discorse are funded by venture capital. Also just because a component of a platform is open source, it doesn't mean the entire thing is and being a proprietary platform isn't harmful itself. It is rather the power that instance owners have and that is a problem even if the instance runs 100% open source software.
If someone does not even know how to collaborate or communicate using open source software I cannot take them seriously running an open source project.
I wonder who is using Discourse successfully and how they measure that success. If your project is awesome but your forum is appalling, you will still get some users who put up with the appalling forum in order to collaborate on the awesome project.
Discourse only "supports" 4 browsers. If you use any other browser you get the frankly ridiculous "upgrade your browser" message. Faking the user-agent shows that the software works just as well (or badly) on other browsers so this is just shoddy behaviour.
Discourse is slow, unwieldy and degrades to almost unusable with JS switched off. It's pretty much the worst forum software I have used. It is not an application to hold up as a shining beacon of what OSS can achieve, unfortunately.
We need a name for the place people go when they "opt out". A positive and defined "somewhere" instead of a negation and a landscape with a random collection of hacks.
Getting the diverse, opinionated and variedly incentivised open source communities to agree on thinking as a unified "something" is like herding cats. But its high time that the desirability and existence of an "opt out" is recognized formally and that won't happen without large scale coherence.
Maybe even the notion "open source" is not longer helpful towards that end. Big tech has inflirtated and one way or another "sponsors" pretty much every major open source initiative.
The starting point is data sovereignty and privacy, but more fundamentally, what we need is agency in the use of information technologies.
People will never opt out from big tech at a large scale. Sure, if I was a hermit or didn't live in The Netherlands I could opt out of WhatsApp. But all group communications happen in WhatsApp, eg. school stuff and play dates for our daughter, sport practice/match coordination, etc. To opt out of WhatsApp basically means opting out of a social life.
Once products are so deeply woven into society that it is not possible to lead a normal life without them, they basically become common infrastructure/utilities. The solution is to regulate privacy requirements (like eg. the GDPR does) and pricing (where applicable).
But is WhatsApp really a social media platform like the others?
I think of it more as a (group) messaging app.
It is not shoving any unsolicited content in my face, so I think it plays fairly nicely. If this were to change, I think there will be huge complaints and people would move elsewhere.
I like the general idea and also try to conceal my identity as much as reasonably possible when out in the world. However, not having a smartphone just isn’t an option for a lot of parents. I’ve long wanted to ditch my iPhone and get a dumb flip phone, but my infant son’s daycare uses three (!) smartphone apps for critical services. Think checking in/out, door access, critical communications, payments. There are no alternatives; you can’t do anything of these things outside of their respective app.
The right thing should be the easiest thing to do.
Yet we live in a world designed in such a way that the easiest thing is to do is giving away your data, throwing away your privacy, and giving a tiny minority of people enormous power over us.
We need to stimulate or else force companies to make honest products and services again.
Like a true divide between those who make hardware/software, and those that run it.
Like in the old days of the internet, where companies such as DEC made the equipment and universities and government agencies ran software on them.
Another approach is to ban all user tracking. We have to ask ourselves, do we really need those highly targeted ads? And do we really need this invisible force that nudges people to consume more in this age of climate worries? It's the same force that sucks people down these spirals of hurtful online content.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] thread"No, I will host or join OSS communities on closed proprietary platforms. Never again. No, I will not join your Discord. No, I will not participate in your subreddit. No, I will not follow your project updates on Twitter."
Matrix, Discourse, and Mastodon exist are are used very successfully by a number of high profile projects. They don't force me to use proprietary, inaccessible, insecure, Electron-ridden clients. They don't force me into draconian privacy policies. They don't force me to prop up VC-funded money pits that will eventually come back around to extract anything they can. They don't treat the closed edges of their platforms as moats by which they can, ooh yeah, build a user base and then eventually hinder the experience in order to extract their deserved profits.
These things matter but people are so short-sighted and forgetful that they just jump from proprietary platform (cough, password managers are another great example), and then inevitably have to jump ship again in N years. Maybe I'm the odd one, but I'd much rather invest a bit more upfront, and deal with UX growing pains, than keeping throwing my knowledge, time, overall investment into a pit that ends up burned by capitalism.
Also, I think hosting an OSS community in non-accessible, proprietary user-hostile platforms is more toxic than... pointing out the originating toxicity.
And GitHub is a great example. I'm tearing my hair out with obvious, obvious feature gaps that have been present for 2+ years, bugs that don't get any replies let alone fixes. And on top of it, GitHub has caused material harm to projects by COMPLETELEY REMOVING access to issues and PRs that later-banned users have commented in. There are entire, important issues and context completely gone now.
And I'm actively working on an alternative to GitHub actions and am looking at moving off GitHub literally this week.
Given the chronic underfunding of OSS projects, this is an absurd take. Whether something is OSS or not doesn’t mean it will have more or less bugs, and it doesn’t mean it will have the set of features you do or do not want.
What it concretely means is that the development of said project can be more aligned with its primary community. But it doesn’t really mean anything for its users.
GitHub is insanely good and has been a massive boon for OSS. Anyone denying this is out of their mind and I will not take them seriously.
I'm getting a bit frustrated. The proposition is really, despite how everyone wants to twist it, quite simple. I spend my life on OSS, I haven't had a paycheck in 5+ years. I'm sick and tired of pouring my expertise and knowledge and investment into platforms that I can't fix. I use closed-source firmware, and that's it. My "unfree" predicates for my NixOS machines contain nothing. That's by design after 25+ years of using computers and applying the same philosophy. I build software and adopt software for the long-term, and every time I break my "okay, this time" rule, I get burned. Case in point, the GitHub issues *that don't exist anymore because GH memory-holed them*
And yes, I spent less time moving my shit to sourcehut and getting CI going there than I did spending additional days working around GitHub. Obviously this isn't feasible for a large project overnight, but responsible projects are absolutely entertaining conversations about it.
It can work /for you/, in a vacuum, because you can selectively accept the tradeoffs. It also used to work for me! I've been in tech long enough to have been through what you're doing, and I have stopped doing it because at some point, it crippled my ability to effect change on the world.
And I'm not interested in living in my bubble of free software a la Stallman. I'm interested in making the bubble larger.
I can't do this from inside the bubble.
(Email me if you want to continue this convo and chat a bit, I'd be interested)
Aren't those more of the same? They contribute nothing that IRC and Usenet didn't have decades earlier. And I thought Discourse was an archetypal Electron app. I avoided it when I can, but I've had to use it a few times and hate it. Plenty of old fashioned forum software is much more usable.
Added: and oh, the opt out site is hosted on github! It says so right on the privacy page. Avoid proprietary whatever, by hosting with Microsoft.... smooth move, lol.
Edit: I see, I confused Electron with EmberJS, another bloaty JS framework. Discourse uses Ember, not Electron. Sorry about that, my bad.
In exchange, I get an OSS forum software, I can interact via email, and valuable OSS information is discoverable via Google. None of which applies to Discord, Twitter, etc.
[1]: https://domains.google.com/registrar/search?searchTerm=noiwi...
Discourse only "supports" 4 browsers. If you use any other browser you get the frankly ridiculous "upgrade your browser" message. Faking the user-agent shows that the software works just as well (or badly) on other browsers so this is just shoddy behaviour.
Discourse is slow, unwieldy and degrades to almost unusable with JS switched off. It's pretty much the worst forum software I have used. It is not an application to hold up as a shining beacon of what OSS can achieve, unfortunately.
Duckduckgo? Thats already more of the same. They made a deal with Microsoft for God's sake.
Getting the diverse, opinionated and variedly incentivised open source communities to agree on thinking as a unified "something" is like herding cats. But its high time that the desirability and existence of an "opt out" is recognized formally and that won't happen without large scale coherence.
Maybe even the notion "open source" is not longer helpful towards that end. Big tech has inflirtated and one way or another "sponsors" pretty much every major open source initiative.
The starting point is data sovereignty and privacy, but more fundamentally, what we need is agency in the use of information technologies.
And even if I do sufficiently contort my facial muscles to pronounce that word, it’s esoteric even for the nerdiest of audiences.
It’ll never fly.
Once products are so deeply woven into society that it is not possible to lead a normal life without them, they basically become common infrastructure/utilities. The solution is to regulate privacy requirements (like eg. the GDPR does) and pricing (where applicable).
I think of it more as a (group) messaging app.
It is not shoving any unsolicited content in my face, so I think it plays fairly nicely. If this were to change, I think there will be huge complaints and people would move elsewhere.
"Follow me on Twitter or Mastodon, or get my newsletter."
No, I'm not kidding, it's there. That is exactly why we come to this website to "opt out" of things, right?
Yet we live in a world designed in such a way that the easiest thing is to do is giving away your data, throwing away your privacy, and giving a tiny minority of people enormous power over us.
Like a true divide between those who make hardware/software, and those that run it.
Like in the old days of the internet, where companies such as DEC made the equipment and universities and government agencies ran software on them.
Another approach is to ban all user tracking. We have to ask ourselves, do we really need those highly targeted ads? And do we really need this invisible force that nudges people to consume more in this age of climate worries? It's the same force that sucks people down these spirals of hurtful online content.