I remember reading once that in the very first years of the existence of the German Democratic Republic, television was the form of mass media that was most critical of the regime. It just wasn’t as influential yet as newspapers and radio, so they didn’t care about it as much; when it became more popular, it too came more under the control of the communist regime.

I certainly agree that the Internet should be by and for individuals; whether we can in the long term do completely without corporations, I am not sure, but the current “algorithmic curation” is definitely a problem.

I mean I agree with that in principle, but: before the Internet, of course big corporations influenced kids and adults! Before the internet only big corporations had the resources and practical ability to distribute any information to a lot of people.

The promise of the internet was that we would have a society where we could all have a say and the flow of information would be democratized. You are right that, because of “algorithms”, that promise hasn’t really been fulfilled.

OT but: How does this Mastodon/Lemmy integration even work? OP seems to be posting on Mastodon but we are commenting on Lemmy which makes everything look confusing.

I think it originally did under old Unix, it was what /home is nowadays; “Unix System Resources” is a backronym.

No it wouldn’t, but people would only see them if they were part of a preexisting community where such things are posted or they specifically looked for them.

On the Internet, censorship happens by having too much information for our limited time and attention span, so going after recommendation algorithms will work.

OsmAnd (another OSM-based app) allows you to set underlay maps from external sources which will be downloaded from those external sources as needed. I do not know if Organic Maps has this feature too but it can clearly be done.

Now that we do so many things through a browser and WebKit/Blink (which run everywhere) have become the de facto standard browser engines, the OS no longer matters as much as it used to.

Remember when we needed to use Adobe Reader (or maybe Okular etc.) to view PDFs?

I think it is a very good thing that we can now do that in the web browser.

Didn’t that happen a long time ago which is how we got MATE?

I no longer follow developments in GTK based DEs much because nowadays KDE Plasma is so clearly the best choice for me, but it has long been my impression that GNOME just wants to be its own thing that doesn’t really care about anyone not using GNOME. This is probably because the main role of GNOME is to be the DE for installations commercially supported by Canonical, Red Hat, etc.

Looking through the ones I have installed, I think these are useful to most people:

• AnySoftKeyboard
• Calculator++
• K-9 Mail
• Open Camera
• Orbot
• OsmAnd~
• VLC

Now that we have Matrix? I would have agreed with you in 2010.

It is supposed to believe that climate change is a … scam?!

You can believe that climate change is not real, but a “scam”, how does that even work?

Probably mainly a matter of saving costs, you get a web interface and a standalone app from one codebase.

Desktop apps nowadays are mostly written in HTML with Electron anyway.

I am too young to remember that. Of course browsers are now free (at least as in beer, many also as in speech) again and that is a good thing. In my childhood, computers were pretty much synonymous with Windows and the web was mostly unusable without Flash Player and it’s a good thing that that has changed. Still, we don’t live in the utopian society I imagined the Internet would lead to.

2004: The Internet is going to lead us into a utopian future of free communication where we exchange ideas with each other without corporate media being gatekeepers telling us what to read, write and think!

2024: Hi, I’m Meta and everyone gets their information from my platforms and I can decide what ideas to allow there. What do you mean we weren’t supposed to have that anymore by now, whoever told you that kind of nonsense.

I think the line is easy to draw: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship

I oppose most censorship, but I do not oppose moderation. If you don’t want to see certain people speaking freely, you shouldn’t have to, but you shouldn’t be allowed to keep them from speaking freely to each other.

Remember when reddit was a free speech platform where pretty much everything legal was ok except doxing?

What went wrong that we can’t have places like that on the Internet anymore?

2004: The Internet is going to lead us into a utopian future of free communication and access to information! No government will ever be able to censor information anymore because they will lack legal reach to censor everything!

2024: