Comment by ofalkaed
1 day ago
The most vocal part of the opensource community tries to sell opensource as an ideology and that that ideology is correct; the sales pitch is "your ideology is wrong." Most people are perfectly happy with their ideology and are not looking for a new one, certainly not looking to be told it is wrong and insulted.
The community (which is often part of the sales pitch) is a minefield to navigate, you have to put in the time to understand the ideology or face its wrath. The general drama of OSS. Most people have enough drama in their life and find ads and sitting on hold with tech support to be preferable.
OSS puts very little effort into trying to understand what most people want from their software and just keeps trying to offer free alternatives which are more about ideology instead of the software needs of most people.
The community just does not make a good impression on most people so they don't pursue it. With most people I have long since learned to be careful about how I talk about OSS because most people have someone in their life who has been trying to convert them for years and that is what OSS has become to them, that friend or coworker or family member they are very patient with. If you want to change people you have to be willing to be changed by them.
> Most people have enough drama in their life and find ads and sitting on hold with tech support to be preferable.
What if I told ya that facebook allegedly detected when teen girls deleted selfies so it could serve them beauty ads.
Did you know that? Do most population know how deeply privacy invasive ads are.
Yes, we might be vocal about it but that's because we care. We care enough for the world to not want it to be a privacy nightmare dystopia and we are advocating it in ways we can take action in. There are people on the political side of things too which are taking action on stronger regulation but I deeply think that politics is so bundled with corruption all across the world that instead of us relying on politics to fix these companies, we need to use open source/stop watching closed algorithmic things and use things like mastodon to slowly get more normal so that we can then discuss things and fix politics/politicians to remove corruption.
How can we do this if the world has created a divide between two parties all across the world and its only fueled by the proprietory algorithmic worlds? How can people care about it if they can't even care about open source in general. I think that if people care about open source/privacy it can be gateway to a better future for us all & this is why we share it.
> If you want to change people you have to be willing to be changed by them.
Like, okay but we change people through logic and reasoning and discussion. Everyone gets changed by a good discussion, you take in more perspectives, I took from this conversation that open source is a chicken and egg problem. People want good UI/UX and support but how many people donate to open source so that either it can get to that state or just have more people willing to open source instead of making yet another saas... not many
Now, that being said, we can reason about things, maybe I can convince you, maybe not.
I just believe this notion to be a little anti-scientific really in the sense, that the mere idea of me wanting to change them shouldn't make me change myself, but that I am always willing to be changed if they can provide reason but from a bird's eye view, I am pretty comfortable that my logic doesn't have much gaps, I have thought about it for atleast a month straight. But I am more than willing to correct myself but the way you word it makes me feel like you want me to change more than be willing to change yourself as well and you might feel the same for me but we are both so convinced by two different realities that we live in. But if you put that aside and genuinely just want a discussion, not wanting to change me or change you but this notion of should we even change people or how can we change people, I am more than willing to discuss. And also maybe change isn't that bad after all :)
> How can we do this if the world has created a divide between two parties all across the world and its only fueled by the proprietory algorithmic worlds
You really think the world wasn’t divided before the internet and Facebook? My still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow south where they were literally and legally separated because of the color of their skin. Society has always been tribal.