Notices by Angle (angle@anticapitalist.party), page 2

I suppose one way to get started on this kind of thing, is for existing FLOSS orgs to try and work not just on their particular projects, but to support the ecosystem as a whole? That's not a small thing to ask, but there are ways to get started - actively working to train new FLOSS devs, or to increase the skills of their devs, for example.

I suppose one problem with government funding is that as soon as a line item shows up in a government budget, there are people looking to cut it and discredit the very idea, regardless of what it is or why it's there. I have no idea what to do about that. I suppose that tendency really needs to be combated in general? It's a real problem though, and not just for FLOSS. :/

Overall, I'm thinking a cellular approach where each organization has a clear primary purpose - but also lots of supporting purposes, and in particular, connects to other cells to help them fulfill their purposes and support each others functions, with lots of inspiration from biology.

I think government funding would be worthwhile - the benefits of FLOSS are ginormous, even in the current state, which delivers like 1% of the potential it could if it were properly supported - and the costs really aren't that high. But in order to get governments on board with this, it needs to be communicated to them, and then we need to actually deliver what is promised.

So, how would the money be sourced? How would it be distributed? I have no idea. I don't think direct consumer purchasing works - the majority of the benefits of of FLOSS require either a total lack of gatekeeping, or are third party externalities anyway. Charity might work? It's iffy. I think overall, the key needs to be government funding, which means governments need to be sold on the idea, and then we need to figure out proper distribution.

There's also the problem of money - some people will work on these problems for free, sometimes even a lot of people, but eventually we're going to need some actual material incentives.

This will add a fair bit of complexity, of course. I'm not entirely sure how to handle that. My first thought is to start off by having people document the work they do? Like, keeping some kind of log of what work was done, where, for what purpose? That's not a small ask though, and it opens up all sorts of opportunities for new problems, so, some experimentation may be required.

There's also the possibility of creating FLOSS orgs dedicated entirely to organizing - but there are a lot of finicky details that need to be handled correctly to make that work properly. :/

next, in order to increase the effectiveness of work, I think we need to specialize? Like, there should be FLOSS devs not associated with any one project, who specialize in a particular area of software development, and who get called in by various projects to help with specific tasks. Profiling and optimization seems like the most obvious place to start with this, but I'm sure there are lots of other things where specialized skills are valuable.

So I was complaining like a week or so ago about FLOSS software not being good - about treating the needs of normal people as though they were secondary and unimportant, and developing exclusively for a narrow group of purists. And I definitely think this happens! Which of course raises the follow up question: What does it take to avoid this sort of thing?

First off, I think it's going to take a lot more work. Which, given that FLOSS software is already struggling to cover the existing maintenance work, is something of a real problem. In order to solve this, I think two things are going to be necessary - both dramatically increasing the amount of work that gets done, *and* increasing it's effectiveness.

In order to increase the amount of work that gets done, I think there needs to be a good system for bringing in new devs and helping to onboard them - I know I've struggled to figure out how to even get started. I think we need dedicated positions for onboarding new people and teaching new devs. This is far from trivial, and I expect it will take a lot of work to figure out how to make it work, but I think it needs to be done.

@paul @georgetakei This raises an interesting question, actually. If you're dealing with an illogical person, is it your responsibility to figure out how to explain things to them?

Like, lets suppose it becomes clear that they don't actually care about logic or sense or facts and they want you to jump through the appropriate hoops to make them feel good, and that only then will they deign to consider whether they might be full of nonsense. Is it your responsibility to do so?

So I was reading a thread about Bluesky's custom feeds tools... And it sounds like the kind of thing I've been advocating for fedi for years now, except they actually went and implemented it.

And like... What the fuck, people. Why couldn't we have implemented this thing first? This is something that frustrates me about open source software in general - people so often treat it as though 'Being Good, Actually' is some secondary goal that doesn't really matter. :/

Look, if the software isn't Good, then most people won't use it. If most people won't use it, then it's doomed to being marginalized. If it's marginalized, then this leaves the majority of technology in the hands of people who will exploit it for their own ends instead of the benefit of the human race as a whole - yes, this will eventually come back around and cause *Problems*.

Elon Musks control of Twitter is one of the things that got Trump elected - and hopefully I don't need to explain to people how bad that is. Imagine if Twitter had already been replaced by a Fedi that was honestly better for everyone? And yeah, the network effect makes that really hard - but lets be honest, part of the reason that didn't happen is because most of us didn't treat it as a priority.

We went 'Eh, good enough for me, everyone else isn't my problem'. Newsflash - they will *make* it your problem. If we don't make technology that's good for everyone, then this lack will be exploited by the unscrupulous for their own ends, and it *will* become your problem, whether you want it too or not.

And this doesn't just go for fedi - I see this problem replicated throughout open source software projects, and it frustrates me to no end. I'd love for the average person to pick up Linux! But we just don't make it practical for them. And no, it's not easy to bridge that gap, it'll require a lot of hard work and major changes to the way we do things, but I really don't think we can afford not to.

I suppose I can blame myself for this as much as anyone else - I've never progressed very far beyond 'complaining on the internet' in any of my own efforts to contribute. I should do something about that.

Maybe I should see about making an organization with the purpose of helping train and recruit new OSS developers, and connecting them with the resources they need to be successful? I have no idea how to go about doing that...

Maybe start by just trying to contribute myself and documenting how it goes? Make youtube videos or something. Then maybe start, like, an informal club where people help each other? Or maybe do that first, and make the videos second?