I think my philosophy when making software is that it should work for people with zero money or no bank account / credit card.
I know it's not a popular mindset to be in since money and profit is everything in the tech world.
I think it comes from growing up as a kid with no disposable income or access to anything but my shitty computer.
I'd rather support people with almost nothing than people with latest and greatest tech gizmos and spare cash for subscription services. 😅
@mauve This is why I'm so interested in this stuff too.
Plus it allows our networks to be flexible in ways that don't require large scale infrastructure.
Like how many people I follow on SSB don't even have internet connections and are usually sailing on the ocean.
@mauve
Strong agree. That's exactly why I asked what I did just yesterday: https://mastodon.joelving.dk/@joelving/110611333090970083
How can we bring those capabilities to more classic web applications?
Peer-to-peer has this natively or of necessity, but can we bridge the classics somehow?
@mauve Honestly I have the exact same mindset as you, which is also what made me interested in movements like https://trade-free.org, I'd like to live in a world where people have equal access to these things regardless of their income, at least for their basic needs. My friend @tio has made this documentary called TROM II and this is one of the core themes explored in the film. He has uploaded it to Peertube for everyone to watch for free, I think you might like it 🙂 - https://www.tromsite.com/documentaries/trom2/
@mauve I'm slowly trying to make a search engine service where you can set up your own search engines. The idea is to make it an offline-first service with no cost. And because of p2p the server costs of hosting will be minimal, so the service could have a really low price. It's basically a freemium business model, but where the free tire users doesn't cost money, and the paying customers also has a very low cost.
@mauve Being a broke kid is what got me into FOSS to begin with! I was blown away that once you installed Ubuntu, a whole bunch of other free and decent software was right at your finger tips (e.g. LibreOffice, Gimp, etc).
And, to a lesser extent, android.
@mauve
for fuckin real. directs everything I do too.
@mauve This is one of the reasons I'm a big proponent of the slow internet movement, as well.
Lighter tools run on more things, even the potato of a phone that was free with a $25 prepaid SIM, for example.
@mauve I believe if a program needs a payment to function it is wasted magmetic storage, wasted bandwidth, wasted time
I understand developers need to eat, but I will rot in hell before accepting paywalls as the only remedy
@mauve ditto and it is why I've been supporting, building demos and PoCs for #SafeNetwork since 2014.
It will be an app platform too, so ideal for building apps that are free for anyone, bypassing gatekeepers and roadblocks.
Keywords: #secure #p2p #LocalFirst #CRDT #decentralized #DBC #InternetArchive
@markhughes If y'all are interested in adding SAFE as a protocol handler in Agregore hit me up on github. :o Always interested in new decentralized protocols to shove in there.
@mauve thanks for the suggestion. Agregore was new to me.
It is too early atm, but even later probably not consistent with Safe Network's goals of maximising the privacy and security of users. I may be wrong about that, but early on there was much debate about adding the ability to access SN websites to existing browsers but it was noted that this was going to make it easier to subvert the security and privacy features of SN.
So the SN browser will not be able to access other protocols.
@mauve having said that I would expect the ability to access SN will be added to other applications including other browsers.
The project itself is though unlikely to encourage it support this, and would be pointing out that it makes using SN less secure.
@markhughes That makes sense. One thing that might be interesting for y'all to explore is to take inspiration from #gemini and have a minimal markup language for content. That way you can lower the barrier to making new clients and slowly iterate on how to make things more dynamic.
In Agregore we have first class support for gemini and for rendering gemtext (and makrdown) from any protocol. (also authoring it is easier than HTML/CSS/etc)
@mauve I think the plan is to have a full feature browser but which cannot be made to phone home or share data without explicit permission.
FYI the intention is also that all data is perpetual, so every version of every web page (or any other public data) is always available (using a capable browser). So no link rot, and the wayback machine / Internet Archive built in.
I will take a look at gemini, so thanks for the rec.
@markhughes Nice that sounds like a great goal. I've been thinking about getting a "secure mode" into Agregore but that'd require editing a bunch of C++ and chromium code which I sadly don't have the spare time for.
@markhughes If y'all decide to go with a chromium fork (like brave) feel free to reach out about how to get custom protocol handlers in there. I ended up doing a lot of late night digging to get it working for agregore-mobile on Android.
@mauve thanks, there has already been a Safe Browser using Electron which works well in an earlier test network but I'm not sure if that will be used going forward as cross platform tooling options have improved a lot (eg Rust/Tauri).
Either way I don't expect work on the browser to resume until the current testing phase completes and launch is close (or has happened).
I'm just a community member BTW, so that's informed speculation!
@mauve
supporting that 100%
either we get rid of money, or we make everyone more or less the same rich 😁
it's hard though, but technically it is in the best interest of the majority of people, so hopefully there is a way to get there
Well, that's all the reason I need to follow you.
It's been quite a while since I wrote any publishable--or even useful for others--code, but that's the way I roll too.
@mauve btw, you’re onto good stuff. any time i was talking to people or overheard people at dweb camp refer to you and your work, it was always good things.
@tychi Ty! I'm thankful to get to work with really cool people on interesting things. Hopefully we can get some of this stuff to a point where it can be useful to the average person.
@mauve When I was a kid I could only play the Lite version of Minecraft PE due to not being able to afford the full version and for such a long time all I wanted were all the features of the full version.
I’ve been considering that I may make all my apps and games free, there wouldn’t be any in app purchases because those suck, I just like to make things for enjoyment and hope others can find enjoyment from them, and one way to maximize enjoyment is by making things free!
@mauve you're not wrong. but the folks making software deserve to be paid too. they dont take karma or upvotes at the grocery store, gas station, hospital billing dept etc
@mauve The objectively correct stance.
Assuming minimal privilege from the users is the only way to have widely applicable program #design (https://mastodon.top/@lispi314/111253066257920146).
@mauve damn right. we were that kid, we're where we are in life precisely because the free software people were out there making sure we got to participate.
@ireneista @mauve I'm echoing exactly what you said but this is super legit. I don't like the idea of charging for anything because I remember being a kid who only had access to free stuff. Linux, GNU compilers, apache, php, rails, even rpg maker (ok that wasn't technically free but there was a very popular pirated English translation) gave me a much better education than taking college classes in high school ever did.
@starlight @mauve for sure <3
@mauve omg, thankyouthankyouthankyou!!1
I'm AuDHD, and constantly moving countries - I'm a thrice immigrant, and I lose access to local documents, phone numbers, physical phones, SIMs, bank accounts, etc. all the time. It's almost impossible to move to a new country and not lose access to a big part of my life
Recently I tried to move my number to a new provider, and they gave me a temporary short number that isn't accepted as valid by some services
@mauve Ukraine denied men abroad consular services recently - and I couldn't renew my passport, and now I'm afraid I'll lose access to every bank account and binance, and whatnot - won't be able to either get my salary or pay rent
@mauve and yes, I spend a lot of my time unemployed. At the end of the last dry spell for a year, I started to look differently at the homeless in my city - not because I didn't see them as people before, but because I started imagining myself approaching them and asking - how do they survive? Cuz I might need their coaching any day
Honestly the only reason I care about #p2p and #localfirst #web stuff is because it gives us practical tools to have nothing but what we have in our pocket and still be able to work with information technology and collaborate with others.
Everything else is just fun extras. :P
It pains me that communities need to either pay a corpo to own all of their shit or deal with complex nerd shit like the cloud to host their own (which is still paying some corpo eventually)