I mean, those services do exist. You have that middle ground. Services like Proton exist. And you can use PixelFed instead of Instagram. The issue with trying to use a FOSS frontend to a proprietary backend… well, it’s already a broken system at that point. And Linux lands on a spectrum of building your own car from scratch and dealing with those problems yourself all the way to someone else maintaining it but you’re limited in scope to what it can technically do unless you go under the hood yourself, and that all depends on the distro.

Computers are technological wonders. Making everything simple and easy actually takes a ridiculous amount of work. So doing stuff yourself is absolutely going to be more difficult than paying for a mainstream turnkey solution where they offset the cost by selling your data or showing you ads. Anything that’s proprietary and private will always cost a significant amount more.

On the other hand, fixing all those problems makes you a really effective problem solver. You learn which technologies are good and which are bad; you learn where to find reliable solutions to problems; and you begin to see where tutorial writers have a lack of knowledge (or were really lazy) and how to fix their problems. It forces you to create good habits and to follow best practices. And years down the line, you’ll have some great, stable software that is the envy of your techie friends.

Sorry this is more of a rant than a real post

Rant my friend! Preach! I feel you on this.

Well, for android at least I understand that app used for paying (Google Wallet, Samsung Pay, Bank apps) are blocked in a root environment, you never know if the app could get compromised and your bank account emptied or whatever. For the remaining, yeah it’s shitty…

Follow the current, it’s encouraging you to reassess what your actual needs are, and giving you an opportunity to simplify your digital life.

I laughed a little because I’m not sure I ever grew out of the expectation of everything being a little broken. You are going to learn so much you could have done without.

On a more sober note I’m not sure adding a business model fixes the problem anymore.

If we paid for our anonymity like toll roads or subscriptions we box out people who can’t afford it. Commodity level information isn’t likely to be decreasing in value any time immediately.

If equitable access is also on the list, I don’t see anything but regulation and taxes getting you there. Just look at the steam store prices outside the first world and you have an idea for how poorly it could go.

Sure is but the pay off is worth it in the end. I see a future where we all (or most of us) have our own little home servers that federate and communicate our own needs vs relying on big companies forever.

Either that or pay for services vs using free ones. Proton suite is a great value and Kagi (paid search engine) is good too. Just little by little be the change you want to see in the world my friend. I started my foss journey with pihole and now I selfhost many things and I even pay for my own website to host email aliases and content on.

It helps if you can treat it as a hobby. My partner’s hobby is music, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do in one’s spare time. I always feel a bit weird when people ask me what I do in my own spare time and my answer is basically fixing my shit, then pushing it just hard enough that it breaks again.

To your question, the unfortunate reality is that those of us who care about privacy and software freedom are a small minority. Why overhaul your business model to suit us when they can continue to milk every other consumer out there who frankly doesn’t give a shit?

Phones are, of course, the worst of all for this. People do great work developing FOSS solutions but it is an uphill struggle and I worry that the hill is getting steeper.

Try to use a mix of both open source and proprietary software depending on the software. I use YouTube with a subscription, and I also use RSS feeds and foss and donate to the creator.

I feel you, but looking at it in perspective the foss world has come a long way and I hope it will get better and better. I try to carry on because I feel it is the right thing to do and I’m encouraged to actually do more with less, but I don’t have any critical task to perform on foss stuff either.

Nothing gets solved overnight. I realize that f-droid isn’t the be all end all, but hey, be the change you want to see in the world. Maybe Aurora is a stop-gap, but maximize your use of f-droid alternatives and support the developers however you can. Be active in alternatives to the big-tech sites, like posting in beehaw communities.

Poaching something I posted on Reddit /r/selfhosted at the beginning of the year:

Back of the envelope math. Assuming 30,000 active users here on /r/selfhosted x $50/yr = $1.5M / 20 -> $75,000 per year. In other words, if /r/selfhosted gave $50 per person per year, “we” could contribute $1.5M to open source projects we use. Some projects probably wouldn’t know what to do with resources and/or don’t have the infrastructure in place to receive anything, so not a panacea. But for the well organized and developed projects?

It’s sort of wild if you think about it. There are probably 10-12 very popular self-hosted applications with a very long tail, but 20-25 probably captures a very healthy cross section of use. Not every project or developer can accept monetary donations or use them effectively. But $75,000/year is median household income in the US.

There are almost certainly many more open source software and app users than there are self-hosted people - I’d imagine the self-host people are a subset. So what if we add open source software and mobile apps to the collective pool we could financially contribute to - again, $50/year/per able user - maybe the number of supportable applications goes up to 50 or 80.

Leading the thought experiment to a logical conclusion - if 80 open source projects received $75,000/year in donation income (at a minor cost to those able to pay and none to the vast majority), enough in most parts of the world to support a person and possibly a family, we would have more amazing, privacy respecting options. It doesn’t necessarily solve everything, most people naturally free-ride, and organizing many small contributions at a massive scale isn’t a solved problem itself. But, my point is that users collectively have way more power than we realize.

I am pro-opensource when possible. I use linux on desktop and laptop, I use foss android apps where available, and am happy to keep that trend alive.

That said, I am not a foss purist. There are things in my life where you gotta do what you gotta do. I have google’d android(a pixel even), I make use of steam and other proprietary game stores, I of course bank using bank things. Sometimes I waste time looking for an alternative only to find I’ve wasted my pre-bed time and Ive stayed up late chasing my tail. It’s just easier to live well.

One thing about FOSS ui is that as frustrating as it is to be forced into someone’s esoteric workflow, it isnt always counter intuitive, just different from how the mainstream does it. There have been a few foss programs where once it clicks I kinda get where they were coming from(and of course many others where I feel the devs are intentionally out there spreading chaos)

There is no ethical way to monetize software because the unethical thing is capitalism itself.

Another point of view is that OSS and Linux is absolutely amazing.

With a very limited set of exceptions, you can grab Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever, make a USB boot drive, and be in a GUI and shitposting on the internet in about 5 minutes.

Linux has grown tremendously from when I started using it, which was when you’d probably have to end up editing a config file for X11 to add the modeline so X knew the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor because there was no auto-configuration for anything more than like 640x480@60hz (and even that might not work).

And in just a few years we went from very very few games working with Wine, to damn near everything that doesn’t need ring0 rootkits working almost perfectly.

So yeah, it’s not perfect, but it’s absolutely light years from where it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago and maybe focusing on how great it actually is vs bemoaning the things that still need work will help keep you motivated.

That said, at the end of the day software is just a hammer: you use it to build something. If Linux doesn’t work but MacOS does, or Windows, or whatever does then use what works. There’s no point in using something that doesn’t do what you want to the point that you’re angry/stressed/tired of dealing with it, because life is way too short to spend all your time fighting broken software when all you wanted to do was draw a picture or play a game or watch a movie or whatever.

Can’t we just find a new way of monetize stuff without ads?

Yes it’s called taxation and public funding.

Governments should prioritize floss projects when running their infrastructure and other projects. Our money is paying for these projects. We should have access to all the products of that labor.

Furthermore they should give out money for non-business cases like games and other stuff just like arts funding.

We have private corps stepping in to do this sort of thing with “google summer of code”. But it would be better through some nominally democratic structure.

In all cases governments and their agents should be good floss community members. “Free like puppies”