very specific project proposal Re: What does Elon Musk say about free software?

[Thomas Lord]

You sparked what I think is a really good idea in my head.
Of course, I can't judge if it really is a really good idea. :-)

I think/guess many people discover that twitter is a fun
and informative way to track some subject of interest.
Four examples:

  - follow all your favorite Hollywood celebrities

  - follow all your favorite news outlets / journalists

  - subscribe to a list that is cultivated to carry the
    tweets of credible climate scientists and related
    climate advocates and experts

  - subscribe to a list of people actively making and
    posting about making music

Conversely, celebrities, climate scientists and activists,
etc. are all seeking to reach large, interested audiences.

AHA!  That can be assembled out of Mastodon with few or no
changes -- mostly just by using it wisely.  As someone said,
the UI might benefit from some loving enhancement and documentation.

Here, broadly, would be the technical infrastructure:

Set up instances dedicated to the "celebrities" in one field
of interest.  It is good to make these redundant and distributed.
For example:

   + a Mastodon instance that solely hosts or mirrors
     credible climate scientists and activists etc.

   + more than one instance, generally mirrors, generally
     each member with accounts on several of them, to
     a avoid central points of censorship or other bad
     policies

Do the same for other areas of interest (e.g. celebrities).

Promote like made to people who it would be nice to sign up
for accounts there.   Make it easy for them to bridge their
accounts with Twitter

Simultaneously set up "participating spectator" instances that
make it very easy for any user to get an account, and follow
everyone on one or more subject area twitter.  Like, one click
and you follow everyone on the climate expert Mastodon network.
One click and you follow all the Hollywood accounts.  Or
users can cherry pick in the usual way from those services - make
it easy for them to find individual accounts there they might want.

Make as much of it free as possible.  Also let people divide up
operating costs for instances that need revenue, including hosting
costs, administration labor costs, and customer support labor costs.
(Don't go for outrageous wages, please.)

If done right, it should be far, far less noisy than the average
twitter timeline!

Here is an example of things that might make sense socially, in
how people use it.  Suppose one or several climate scientists
want to "take questions" from followers.  Make sure it is easy
for them to use some account to post an "AMA" (ask me anything)
and let people respond to the AMA.  Make it easy to screen and
select questions asked because otherwise... you know.  And make
it easy for them to create a clear timeline of questions asked
and answers offered by one or more of the participating experts.

That'd be information rich, low-distraction, naturally inclined
to be more civil and friendly twitter.

Also, the whole system would "scale down" to smaller local interest
groups that, even though they aren't celebrities, can set up
those hub instances for their local interest.

People can already do most of this hand, but an organized
effort, including recruitment of experts, and spending on promoting
the system, would be the kind of thing the FSF ought to be
rushing to do.

-t



On 2022-04-30 16:23, Yasuaki Kudo wrote:
> I think Free Software licenses are great and the rest is just pure
> competition of merits.
>
> We can reduce the activity to just being better than proprietary.
>
> For this, we need to be really creative.  Just Replacing twitter with
> something else is one simple idea but certainly just a beginning of
> our brainstorming.
>
> - Email is a dominant protocol but there are many service providers.
> Can we do something similar for public messaging?   I have this
> mastodon thing and I have been a computer programmer for 30 years but
> I still can't figure out how it works at all.   The whole thing is
> very cryptic.  What's wrong here?
>
> - It seems that certain public do want censorship according to their
> taste - how do we enable this?   This is a kind of feature that favors
> Free Software version because when it comes to any control or
> empowerment, the owners of proprietary systems insist they and only
> they have a leg up.
>
> - Advertisements are very annoying.  Free Software versions can remove 
> them?
>
> - Can we create a 'crowd development' systems development model
> designed to work with thousands of software designers, specification
> writers, programmers and so on.
>
> - Free Software movement seems quite weak on getting involved with the
> much larger community of the general public.  Can we do better?
>
> etc.
>
> Oh man, this gets me very excited!
>
> Monopoly systems becoming obsoleted by new paradigms are very normal
> around the computer circle - can Democratic Software movement do the
> same against the incumbent oligarchical systems? 😄
>
> -Yasu
>
>
>
> > On Apr 30, 2022, at 20:46, Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support> wrote:
> >
> > * Thomas Lord <lord@basiscraft.com> [2022-04-29 17:49]:
> > > This is an opportunity to greatly expand the number
> > > of people who use free software, and to help them
> > > learn why it - and why resisting untrustworthy
> > > websites - is valuable.  Thus, it is the FSF's reason
> > > for existence, writ large.
> > >
> > > I think they will make excuses and stay sleepy at the
> > > wheel, so to speak.
> >
> > I know that FSF has full hands of work.
> >
> > You are free to contribute to it, or otherwise contribute to the cause
> > by your own initiatives.
> >
> >
> >
> > Jean
> >
> > Take action in Free Software Foundation campaigns:
> > https://www.fsf.org/campaigns
> >
> > In support of Richard M. Stallman
> > https://stallmansupport.org/