@JPEG Hope you don’t reconsider Mast being open source because of them! If they want to fork, let them. We’ll see which fork is better 😉.
BTW, did I misunderstand or is it still possible to use Gab, just not possible to sign up? In which case I would say they’re not blocked and merely discouraged and are making a fool of themselves for nothing. You can always sign up on Web!
I’m personally not a fan of filtering in software instead of at the backend, but it’s your app 🙂.
@js I’ll be keeping it open source :) not letting a few bad actors impact anything. And Mast blocks them from signing up at all so they can’t use the app if they can’t get in when entering an instance.
@JPEG Ah. That I’m not a fan of. Not because I like Gab, but it makes me wonder if e.g. my instance ever gets blocked because you and @angristan get into an argument or whatever. Software should let me do what I want to do. It’s ok to have defaults that I need to change, it’s ok to block sign up as that’s kind of an endorsement, but I’m worried about software that enforces opinions and gets in my way :/. Gab is an easy one, but what’s next?
@js @angristan That’s entirely understandable and a very valid point. I think the distinction here is between what’s widely regarded as hate speech and ‘nazis’ etc. That’s wholeheartedly considered ‘bad’. I would never stop anyone using the platform for personal preferences or reasons otherwise that don’t cause any harm on others.
@JPEG That's good to hear! 🙂
But there's a few other problems as well, even with the Gab ban. I've learned early (~ 2003 or so) that using software to fix social problems doesn't work and only makes everything worse.
Then there's that open source licenses explicitly don't limit how it can be used. I'd like to not allow any military to use my software - but then it would not be open source anymore, so I do not have such a clause. Things would quickly get incompatible and the software [1/n]
i'm starting to think Crockford had the right idea…
@VyrCossont @JPEG That's not true. It's a problem with with any license to which you add usage restrictions. The FSF just disallowed any restrictions.
As soon as you have different licenses with incompatible terms, you have a problem. Example: If someone uses the BSD license and adds "Can't be used by Germans" (using that as an example as I am German), and someone else adds a "Can only be used by Germans", then those two can never be combined.
As you can see, not an FSF problem.
if you have to find or write a library that does allow use by Germans but doesn't allow use by the military, it serves your goal of not allowing use of your software by the military
it might also be some extra work but what social good isn't?
@VyrCossont @JPEG Well what if you have two libraries that you want to use that have an incompatible license?
What about the example I gave of ESR then forbidding you to use his software?
how much do you want your software to not be used by the military?
also ESR is a documented homophobe, sexist, and gun nut, a real piece of shit who i find objectionable both personally and politically. so i already don't use his software. no problems there. 😇
@VyrCossont Exactly - we already have license problems because there's so many. Now if everybody adds their own clause on usage restrictions, there's basically almost no compatibility left anymore.
And yes, you do use ESR's software. You have it on your system. You're using it daily. I'm sure. I mean, do you use e-mail? Do you use anything with ncurses? There you go. I intentionally picked ESR *because* he is objectionable and yet everybody uses his software.
there are a lot of them around these days, although major projects adopting codes of conduct seems to piss them off…
and the answer is that, based on our conversation, you seem to care more about license fragmentation than people fragmentation
interesting choice
we also need to continue to make it *socially* unacceptable to be a neo-Nazi or other element of Gab's target market, and that includes irritation-level barriers like @JPEG including Gab on Mast blocklists, and i'm happy to see more and more of that happen.
@VyrCossont @JPEG Yup. That has fortunately happened in Germany 😀. Most of the shit they say is outright illegal here and jailable. Unfortunately, there's parties like AfD who try to make it normal again 😟.
@VyrCossont I'm thinking putting a line that says "Any military is not allowed to use this software" is only causing fragmentation, because a military won't care anyway about such a clause. So you get fragmentation and the software is still used by the military. I definitely don't want my software to be used to kill people, but there's only so much I can do.
jumping onto one long-obsolete mail program that someone else wrote hardly makes him irreplaceable email infrastructure
and the only TUI app i use even weekly is tmux 😝
but i'm not going to do a point by point refutation of your scenario…