Comment by floundy
1 day ago
Might sound elitist but the average person isn’t curious enough to figure this stuff out, and above all else they’re lazy. If it’s not a one click install and does something better than what they’re using, why would they switch?
The average person is fine giving up their data and time in exchange for entertainment and convenience. Free software is good but it comes at the cost of time, you have to learn and be at least semi-competent with a terminal and/or Linux to truly use most FOSS stuff and it’s just beyond the average person. They either don’t have the interest, or don’t have the capability to learn it and for all intents and purposes those are fundamentally equivalent.
Honestly, nothing “bad” has happened to most people as a result of data harvesting. The Equifax breach got a ton of people, including hardcore privacy nerds. There’s just some stuff you can’t turn off to participate in modern society.
There are millions of things in the world today that I’m not “curious” about. I’m sure a car mechanic could wonder why people aren’t interested in rebuilding a motor or a construction worker would wonder why people aren’t interested in doing their own major renovations - actually no they wouldn’t.
Only geeks seem to elevate a computer to some type of religious thing that should be more than just a tool. This is coming from someone who started coding in assembly in the 6th grade in 1986.
But in the year of our lord 2025 at 51, the computer and technology is just an enablement tool for me to accomplish something else or a means for me to trade my labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. I have a dozen things I would rather be doing after I get off of work than futz around with technology.
100% agree that most people aren't curious about it.
but still, that is why I mentioned some priorities in sharing open source. If I share some niche golang/rust tool, I am sure most people wouldn't care but if I share something like f-droid/signal. I feel like that can help out a lot of people instead.
The result of data harvesting is not a breach. but the whole system that it is right now, for all such data harvesting imo, the most common fraction seems to be hate which gets the most engagement which is why to me most social media feels hateful off the start and why its linked to some of the issues we have right now. Its definitely escalated.
There are some genuine problems in economies all around the world yet if those nations leaders try to scapegoat, trying to create a us vs them, its not a good fix and shit might break and we would all be too invested in watching yt shorts.
What I am advocating with foss is also federation/curated social media with no algorithms but that is the step two imo. The step one to mass adoption for such things might be to have people more familiar/comfortable with open source.
Overall, we need to fight on both fronts if we want change. Both algorithmic and open source apps based. Some open source apps are predatory, they will charge you recurring and hope you forget. Some cheap/quickly built games which can be open source for android for all purposes aren't open source right now and they exploit children's lack of financial knowledge in that sense(scams of sorts).
I think people will create 10$ subscriptions to a local text editor in this world. I just wish instead of people spending those 10$ there or somewhere else, why can't we donate to open source as a society so that the software can be more complete/helpful to even more people and so on and so on...
What are your thoughts?