Germany is doing plenty of extra-judicial repression of pro-Palestine activism. Jurisdiction doesn’t matter.

I live in Germany, and it’s a totally realistic scenario, especially in Bavaria. They seize computers to intimidate digital activists all the time for way less serious topics.

Cooking is not a standardized or reproducible process at home, because the variables outside of anybody’s control. Modern mass recipes give only the illusion of being reproducible algorithms, but they will never achieve that.

Grappling with the complexity of different tooling, supply chains, seasonality and so on, all within a recipe, is a futile effort. That complexity must be handled outside the recipe.

The first line of the documentation is pretty clear: “Bonfire is an open-source framework for building federated digital spaces where people can gather, interact, and form communities online.”

You’re making this comment in a community named after a specific software ideology.

Positioning the project. Putting the project’s value before the tool it produces or the problem it solves is a specific stylistic choice. Just not in the software projects you’re usually involved in.

It’s an elixir skeleton that runs a system of modules you can combine (just with configs) or that you can extend by adding new modules.

The skeleton does the bare minimum and the modules contain all the logic. It’s not a no-code tool (that would be astounding, but doesn’t exist yet), you still need to write some config files (flavours) or write some elixir.

In open source circles, a technical description of what a tool does might be the norm, but in many other spaces, signaling your values and ideology is more important than the technicalities. For you it’s buzzwords, for other people it means a very specific positioning.

This is a good starting point: https://trent.mirror.xyz/GDDRqetgglGR5IYK1uTXxLalwIH6pBF9nulmY9zarUw

Licenses don’t stop bombs. In general, informational freedoms always benefits the stronger actor, because they already have the means to exploit the information better than other actors. Legal restrictions are just a bump in the road if what you produced is really really valuable for a corporation or a state entity: they can reimplement it, exploiting the design and “trial-and-error” work embedded in whatever you produced, or they can simply ignore licenses because nobody is going to ask the Israeli’s military to respect a license when they are slaughtering civilians.

Social problems never have technical solutions.

If you want to make software that is not captured by state or corporate power, you must create software that is incompatible with whatever they need to do. Embed a social logic that is worthless to their system but useful to our system. Anything else is eventually going to be captured. There’s a lot of literature on anti-capture design, and some of it manages to rise above the purely techno-optimist logic and provide something useful.

It’s a toolkit to build federated apps, with a social media+blogging+collaboration platform built on top of it.

I know it’s a tough ask. In the meanwhile I’m exploring the possibility of embedding excalidraw into something else but I don’t know.

I already contribute to wikis on this topic, like Activist Handbook, but they are not the right format for what I need. Linked documents have limited expressivity and visual people are currently underserved, hence the diagram approach.

Another similar thing would be to use stuff like obsidian canvas which is something in between

It would just be much easier to use UTC as the standard for all cross-timezone activities. The small portion of the population who needs to think about timezones would just have to add another timezone to their digital tools and the others won’t have to do anything.

DEI is definitely used in corporate environments. I understand this use of the term as “rightswashing”, where the corporate performs inclusivity without actually doing anything about it.

Experience itself is a fiction. What you see through your eyes or hear through your ear is a fiction, a fiction you decide to believe.

Its impossible for the consciouss mind to not experience anything Lot of people would disagree on this. A lot of spiritual practices are exactly about experiencing the non-experience, experience what cannot be described, explained or thought. If you’re lazy, a big enough of an LSD dose will bring you there in a couple of hours.

Spirituality is the system you use to create reality. Reality is not a given, it’s something you build for yourself. What you’re describing is also a very specific spiritual and metaphysical system.

I followed a similar trajectory, leaving the tech sector to pursue politically-motivated jobs. Am I locked-in? Probably, my linkedin is full of agitprop. Do I care? No, the world is on fire, there’s no coming back. I get to the end of the month, I’m doing important stuff, fuck careers, there are more important things.

The person I know that got fired is even more gung-ho than me so I can imagine they don’t care either.

From what I know, no. It’s full of more politically-aligned workplaces, like NGOs and research groups, that crave politically-motivated people with tech skills. I know personally one of the fired workers that went on to do a PhD right after being fired.

I don’t know what understanding you have of this topic, but historically and presently, the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are ideological opposites, with the latter spawning off of the first to accomodate pro-corporate, pro-capitalist positions.

Both of these are also different from the totality of entities proposing “open source licensing”, which is a much broader set.

Then nowadays the Free Software Movement lost its momentum and it has been subsumed into the idea of “FOSS”, but still, it should be treated as its own, dinstinct entity.

As for the genocide per default part: Its nonsense to believe that if open source didnt exist or was different that it would somehow lead to less genocide.

Open source is just a technical and legal reflection of a world and a time where Imperial venture capital benefited from the free flow of information. I think the author would agree that, if open source didn’t exist, something else would have enabled similar or different forms of Imperial oppression, including genocide. Same for the start-up ecosystem, digital capital taking over the financial economy and Western democracies and so on. Open Source enabled that? For sure. But if we want to play “what if”, any serious materialist analysis would conclude that Open Source was just a tool for digital capital to express itself and exploit workers. A tool that could have been replaced by something else.