Taggart :donor: on Nostr: The thing is, as I get older, the less and less I care about the apparatus as an end ...

The thing is, as I get older, the less and less I care about the apparatus as an end unto itself. And consequently, the apparatus becomes less and less valuable as a moral cause.

Is there value in open/free/libre software? In open/free/libre networks? Of course there is. I wouldn't be here if I believed otherwise.

But! Those tools can only become agents of good if they are used by people. In the case of a social network, the scale kind of matters for its utility.

Not every network needs to be planet-scale, or even country-scale. But some pretty remarkable things—both good and bad—can happen when large groups of people share a space.

I guess I'm thinking about this: the Iranian revolutionaries who organized on Twitter didn't give a rip about how "open" the tool was. Nor did the protestors after George Floyd's murder. Or MeToo. Or any of the others.

You want to resist the strong hand of corpos and authoritarianism? Rad. Those folks were actually doing it, and what they did mattered a hell of a lot more than the tool they used to do it.

So if you want your free/open/libre tool to "change the world," you might want to consider 1) making it accessible to people outside your ideological enclave, and 2) discovering what "normal" users of a tool might actually want.