Isn't it funny how within 24h the approach to #Keybase changed from "it's secure and awesomesauce, use it for everything!!1!" to "I just use it to share stuff but warn users not to do sensitive stuff there"?
No, actually it's not funny. Because it keeps happening:
1. a new shiny startup does X in an open source but centralized way
2. a lot of "experts" saying how great it is; some greybeards warn that it's centralized but nobody listens - it's so shiny and cool!
(cont.)
(cont.)
3. startup makes a horrible business decision or gets bought up by someone onerous; it's inevitable, it's a startup.
4. everybody's shocked, shocked™, but still go with "using it for non-sensitive stuff, too late to move on"
5. rinse, repeat.
Do you know why we don't get a proper, decentralized, easy to use software solutions? This is why. Because we keep letting shitty startups crowd out the good projects.
(cont.)
recemtly I heard Bradley Kuhn making this argument: IRC os old an crank but it has resisted the onslaught of the proprietary chat techs
Why ?
Because its people clung on it
It's not the tech, its the culture
In some cases it's the anthropologies that drive the tech, not the other way around
and geeks suffer from dopamine pollution as everybody else 🤷♂️
yeah, lack of features can explain some things
But I think the FLOSS devs would have stuck on IRC even if it had been a bit more featureful
Very interesting document, anyway 🤔
one of the lacking feature that I appreciate the most is the fact that IRC doesn't participate in the "notifications" circus
I get to see it when my own processes bring me to it
@AbbieNormal @rysiek IRC FTW!
@mmu_man @AbbieNormal @rysiek I'd disagree, sadly. I don't think IRC has really survived the proprietary silos.
The fact that you can still go on IRC and see channels, etc. -- well, great.
But instead of the old days when a bazillion people were *actually* on and banging their keyboards constantly, now it's a bunch of mostly dead channels with lurkers logging.
In contrast, Slack and Discord seem to be where all the action has gone.
Probably because IRC stayed old school text-only.
@AbbieNormal @rysiek That, and you can't take over something that's owned by everyone and no-one. IRC still exists because there's no company behind it that can be bought out.
This is also why XMPP has survived until today: XMPP is a pile of open standards. There is no central commercial entity that "owns" them. XMPP is not a product of a company that can be proprietarised or extinguished with a swift hostile buyout by Microsoft or Apple or whomever.
@AbbieNormal @rysiek to add to the IRC sticking around thread, i do like the ideas proposed in https://sobtec.gitbooks.io/sobtec2/en/content/05irc.html "It seems that technical deficiencies can have positive social consequences"