Mastodon Tale

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 15, 2024,
updated Apr 22, 2024

• TechTea ☛ Elitism, Identity, and the Open Source Community

  Ruben Schade recently posted on the Fediverse about how Windows users have the right to complain about the enshitification of the Windows operating system. He was calling for empathy for the people who have no choice but to run Windows. The responses were so awful he had to make a post on his blog addressing them. Kev Quirk also posted about the immaturity of these folks on his blog. Even one of the admins, @pamela, had to publicly announce that they had to block and ban people from the instance because of bad behavior relating to Ruben’s post.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Lessons from my Linux fun on Mastodon

  I’ve copped negative feedback before when mentioning my preference for permissive [sic] licences like BSD/ISC/MIT, and my sympathy for people stuck using commercial software. But this was the first time I was openly described as being a corporate shill, a defender of capitalism, and enforcing serfdom onto those who are scared of freedom. It was their ideology espoused in its pure, uncut form, and I’ll admit it was a bit scary.

  I get that they want to change the world, and they see the GPL as a means to achieve this. But I want to be crystal clear here: my experience over the last couple of days has evaporated any residual sympathy I had for their cause. This wasn’t just an ineffectual waste of time, it was actively counterproductive to their goals. GNU/Fail.

  This vocal subset don’t represent the views of everyone who supports Free Software, nor do they condone the actions of those hellbent on making their wider community look obtuse, or worse. But my lesson here is to block and move on. There’s nothing to be gained from a conversation, and I have better uses of my time.

update

More here:

• Lessons from my GNU/Linux fun on Mastodon

  Last Saturday I made the mistake of asking GNU/Linux people not to tell those who need backdoored Windows to use Linux, and answered the most popular replies.

  I thought it was innocuous, but at the time of writing, it has over a hundred (visible) comments, five hundred reposts, and a thousand likes. This is a typical evening for a Hololive vtuber, and a quiet day for a politician or musician. But by the standards of someone with social anxiety, and empathy for long-suffering backdoored Windows users? It was an omnishambles.

  A few Australians got that reference. I wish I didn’t.

  I’ve been overwhelmed by the emails, direct messages, and comments supporting what I said. Thank you, especially to those of you I didn’t get a chance to tell directly. But I do think I learned a few things from the experience.

  Generalisations

  The first is that people really don’t like generalisations. If I’d qualified “Linux people” with “some”, I suspect this would have nipped a lot of this in the bud. A number of comments explained why they personally don’t engage in that behaviour, and that my characterisation was unfair (or a less charitable term).

Also here:

• Linux Elitism...Again

  Once again the GNU/Linux elitist and reply guys rear their ugly head to show that this particular penguin shaped leopard cannot change its spots. 😔

  So Ruben Schade wrote a post over on Mastodon which resulted in the GNU/Linux trolls coming out in force for him.

Much later:

• Ignoring email for a bit

  The fallout from suggesting to (certain) GNU/Linux fans that some still need to run Windows continues. I’m ignoring social control media for a bit, but I’m still getting regular angry email.