Richard Stallman had a dream where you control your computing. And XMPP is the closest social network in line with Richard Stallman’s vision of the internet. This instant message protocol, allows for you to easily host your own server, it’s fast and efficient, and has lots of different open source clients to choose from. Additionally, by making it extensible, it allows for anyone to build upon it to get their own desired features. This article goes over some of the basics of XMPP: https://simplifiedprivacy.com/xmpp-decentralized-signal-get-your-own-social-network/
Note: There are no affiliate links or sales text in this educational article discussing open source. Let’s discuss the technology and not attack the author.
I wish we could stop deifying Richard Stallman. He had a good idea once, but the open source movement has outgrown him and his transphobic misogynistic beliefs
You forgot ‘pedophilic’.
I think the problem there is that, for many years, nobody bothered to explain to him exactly why child porn is bad.
Most people observe that everyone else thinks it’s bad and don’t question it any further. That’s not good enough for Stallman, though, and for good reason: expecting him to unquestioningly bow to peer pressure is an insult to his intelligence.
Someone did eventually explain the problem to Stallman. I don’t know what exactly was explained, but my guess is that Stallman was told that child porn is non-consensual and therefore violates the child’s privacy, similar to how revenge porn violates the subject’s privacy. At any rate, after that discussion took place, Stallman did an about-face on the subject, and is now opposed to child porn like anyone else.
Moral of the story: taboos and peer pressure bad; logic and education good.
Is he a robot? This iseems like a very strange thing to have to explain to a grown-ass man.
Probably just autistic, I mean as far as I know he hasn’t been diagnosed but he’s checking a lot of the boxes. And the way he views the world and basing conclusions on those views make sense to me in that context.
He’s just more rigid and extreme in approaching the world from that frame of mind than most people are. Thus sometimes leading to “bad” takes where his intentions are probably not terrible in the way people think they are.
How was he supposed to know, if no one ever told him? They didn’t teach about child porn when I was in school, and Stallman is older than me.
Gosh, how would someone ever figure out child abuse is a bad thing?
We are discussing the porn itself, not what happened in the process of making it. If it were illegal to possess a video because it depicts a crime, then it would also be illegal to possess a video of police murdering innocent people, and we definitely don’t want to go there.
for observers: please don’t essentially argue possession of child sex abuse material should be legal because otherwise the standard is set for making videos of police committing crimes illegal
This is an extremely weird comment to make. Are you implying that sexual abuse being wrong needs to be taught explicitly ?
Mind shedding some light for an internet stranger?
The open source community (or movement) is about, well…open source that many of us here benefit from and greatly appreciate. While everyone is free to agree or disagree with the personal ideals of any developer who has made their positions known, it’s not fair to discount the importance of someone’s historical contributions just because their current opinions seem incongruent to our own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
We dont need shitheads in open source. There are plenty of other minds out there without doing any “separate the art from the artist” non-sense talk.
FOSS doesn’t need assholes like stallman and better people are doing the work now he started years ago.
We kinda do need him, though. Very few people are as intensely principled as he is on the subject of computing freedom, and without him anchoring the Overton window, there’s nothing stopping the Bill Gateses of this world from moving it.