My Issue With Free Software Community
I used to have a small degree of respect for the free software community. However what seems to have happened was that, over the period of time that they gained influence in the tech community, they started splitting apart based more on political differences rather than based on a genuine desire to protect people’s privacy. The biggest problem I found, is there are people online with competing interests that all claim to represent the true goals of free software. If you take each and every individual out there’s word for such things, you end up running across people that make unproveable claims like “Nitter Net is affiliated with Facebook”.
For one thing, simply being the front end to a website is not enough to actually prove that a place has a direct affiliation. What this sounds like to me is someone confusing their political views with the free software movement. If I had not been more aware of what was going on, I would have unintentionally given up the name of my laptop device on there. Which while in most cases is not specifically harmful, it can, if you’re a high value target, allow an attacker to launch zero days into their system.
Interestingly, this same person also advocates for Privacy Bin. Maybe there is no more to it than that, however to me it seems weird that they would bash Nitter Net, but then not bash other aspects of privacy theater. This is why you really need to be careful about whose word you trust online. Even if they seem to represent your best interest. People ultimately like helping people because it improves their image, and their ability to manipulate others. Now I have no idea if that is actually the intention here.
But Nitter Net allows me to do things that I can’t otherwise do: follow the newsfeed of Twitter people that blocked me on social media that blocked me as businesses rather than as individuals. What it almost seems like is that is the aspect of nitter net they don’t like, and it certainly doesn’t have to do with any kind of affiliation with Facebook.
I had already kind of thought of distancing myself from free software circles just anyway, do to their strange views about artificial intelligence, that no relationship with reality of actually developing a system. Just because it’s AI, for example, doesn’t mean it collects your data. And I’ve seen software like switching.software that even allows for some data analytics platform, so long as it conforms to the standard of Free Software.
I have found free software also doesn’t seem to make a distinction between Copywrite owned by individual authors and creative, and computer software professionals. To this date they have never clarified this matter. With Richard Stallman somewhat out of the picture, I feel like the Free Software circles are splitting, and beginning to show some of their hypocracy. Even if Richard Stallman were not canceled per say, there would still be a ton of issues about what he advocated for: bashing the Creative-Commons license schema as well.
In fact, Creative-Commons is one example where there isn’t even common agreement on licensing schemes between Open Source and Free Software communities.
Please be mindful of where you get advice from.