Notices by Kit Rhett Aultman (roadriverrail@signs.codes)

@miah I have traveled to the UK on my X marker twice this year and not had a meaningful issue. Delta mis-handled my new passport with an X marker and had to re-enter it when I checked in once. On the second trip, leaving the US, Delta asked to scan my passport a second time for some reason. But nobody's stopped me from doing anything, called my passport invalid, etc, etc.

@jollysea The English name was actually Clippit. "Clippy" was a nickname that just kinda stuck.

@dgodon @simonbp Just remember that there will always be "what ifs" and that you're at least doing something other than sitting in analysis paralysis.

@carnage4life Was it only memecoins they claimed had no value or all crypto?

passports should have no gender and also they should not even exist

Roller derby is just nourishing to my heart.

So is laying in bed sipping the best whiskey ever and rewatching Star Trek TNG.

@feralthoughts @nitrml @santiago @anilmc @augustocc I guess I thought that a server like botsin.space was more central. Guess I learned something.

@roadriverrail I don't speak for the rest of the Jellyfin team, but for me personally, I find the idea that we are in competition with other media servers or streaming services awkward/funny at a surface level and disingenuous/manipulative at a deeper level.

I do not work on Jellyfin because I want to "beat" Netflix. I do not work on Jellyfin because I want to "beat" Plex.

Those are nonsense.

I work on Jellyfin because I use it. I want it to be the best it can be. I also want it to do things it doesn't currently do.

I work on it because I find it fun.

And that's it. The day I stop having fun is the day I quit working on it.

I could not care any less about anyone's perceived competitors, user count goals, revenue goals, etc. Those are nothing but manipulation tools people use try to leverage FOSS programmers into working on what they want them to work on.

@tgpo Granted, now that I know about Jellyfin, I'm kinda looking side-eye at my Nas and its Plex installation...

@FediTips @3dcandy As the former developer of an Android photo sharing app for Ello, I know this one quite well.

@nitrml @santiago @feralthoughts @anilmc @augustocc I'm really just spit balling and haven't thought this through, but I'm curious if maybe a bot would help here? I'm imagining a way to better concentrate boosts of posts from less visible geographic regions so that following the concentrator bot would be a better one-stop shopping point and also make direct federation to those servers happen?

@gabek @tgpo @ajroach42 We're just here and happy to try and make something for ourselves and our friends. It might become another Linux success case; it probably won't, but we're learning and making ourselves happy along the way. Don't lecture us about how to "win" in your eyes. Work towards your vision or don't, but your standards of success aren't owed to you. Be a FOSS person and make your own dream a reality, build community, and see where the journey takes you. 11/11

@gabek @tgpo Meanwhile, thanks to #Owncast, I have a thriving side career as a DJ. Thanks to #Peertube, @ajroach42 has developed a cable TV channel. Countless people have enjoyed their audiences on Owncast, and we've had some really lovely, wonderful times, and we're super happy to have others bring in their new energy, their new ideas, their successes, their joys, and their struggles. We know we can't "win" against the behemoths...who can often freely use our own work against us! 10/?

@gabek @tgpo And certainly don't think that scolding people with absolute user-base sizes will do it. As a Mastodon admin, I know that every new user costs me money. Where's the money to "beat Instagram/X/whatev" supposed to come from? Should we all plow our paychecks into it and impoverish our families? And why, so we can, vaguely, "win"?

Should us #Owncast devs handle 100x increase in user support so we can "win"? Where's that labor going to come from? 10/?

@gabek @tgpo So, please don't think you're helping if you come around telling a FOSS community they ought to plan around the needs of a user base you've imagined and can't even prove exists. If you need, say, a Kodi client for your favorite streaming service, write it. Or pay a grant to someone for it; it's probably not much. Maybe find 9 other people who want it and split that cost 10 ways. Whatever it is, be the change you want, because you're the new energy. 9/?

@gabek @tgpo FOSS projects "win" by existing and being meaningful to the people they help and enable. If they become a credible threat to, or a useful tool for, a capital-driven machine that can and will destroy anything it cares to, that is actually quite beside the point. We call those things the "success stories" because they're what people see. But any FOSS project that gives some people what they want and thrives at least for a while, was a "success." 8/?

@gabek @tgpo This is also to say that virtually no FOSS project, except those commissioned and funded from the start, set out to dominate, to capture millions of users, or to "win" against a commercial adversary. It's absurd to think that anyone honestly set their sights on "winning" over Alphabet, X, or Meta. Linus Torvalds didn't want to "beat" Microsoft; he wanted to play with Minix on his x86 machine. Linux, according to the original usenet posts, was never supposed to be a big deal. 7/?

@gabek @tgpo That contribution could be blogging, community newsletters, hype, or staying around to help answer newer users' questions. In fact, any user-facing FOSS project desperately needs those people because, as user bases scale, so does the amount of community support and engagement, and if it falls on too few heads, the project suffers. Indeed, if the core of the project loses the joy of working on the project, they burn out and the project either grows obsolete or becomes abandoned.6/?

@gabek @tgpo Consequently, unless a project has matured to the point that it's securing funding to actually hire people for features (and that will likely be below market wage rates), it is, and will remain primarily a shared act of joy for those who contribute and power-use. Tech support is usually a shared effort among them, a result of users asking questions in chat or on mailing lists. The sincere hope of a healthy project is that users become contributors themselves in some way. 5/?

@gabek I'm blessed that @tgpo is now along for the ride; his rewrite has us in a place where I might deliver features more than once a year! Yes, once a year! FOSS contributors may not even consider the project their primary hobby, let alone be a career. Almost all of my FOSS contributions over the last few years came while I was on vacation! Imagine that...I took a vacation to work on a personal project and ended up shelving it to contribute to a different project along the way. 4/?