Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Questions about Google+

[Paul M]

On Thu, 2016-04-28 at 07:39 -0400, Dave Rolek wrote:

> When I talk personally with people, I find that virtually everyone has
> an interest in the values of free/libre software, but the biggest
> difficulties come due to lock-in that has "accumulated" over the
> years.  So I'm all in favor of making it easier for people to switch
> to free software :).
> However, we must be mindful that if we make a nonfree environment too
> convenient (here: to follow us on social media) - noticeably more than
> our free environments - we may find that we are *contributing to*
> lock-in indirectly.  (The network effect[0] here is unfortunately
> reinforcing, i.e. a "positive network externality".)

As the closure of Google code and the steady decline of Source Forge
shows relying on services you don't control can be problematic.
Distributed VCS provides some protection for code, but the things that
surround this.

> I think Alexander's suggestion for small updates on the nonfree social
> media (with link to full story) might work fairly well.  Has anyone
> done something like that and can comment on it?

This has a lot of parallels with the IndieWeb [1] movement, which aims
to promote 'owning your own data'. In particular the idea of POSSE
(Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) is of relevance. There are
plenty of examples of people, in Indie Web,  publishing stuff on their
own web site and then pushing out to commercial silos such as Twitter
(though, notably, 
Google+ makes this very hard to achieve) as well as services etc to make
this easier [3]. 

Paul M

[1] http://indiewebcamp.com/why
[2] http://indiewebcamp.com/POSSE
[3] e.g. https://brid.gy