Wobbly One Of Myriads @wobblewuffess@awoo.space

I'm non-binary! My pronouns are they/them.

That means I am only correctly gendered by a few close friends because correcting off-binary means giving a dozen daily Gender 101 lectures to impatient/argumentative audiences who will assuredly continue to misgender me because language shifts are fucken hard.

Hell, I misgender myself pretty regularly, and I've been an enby for years now.

I don't hold it against people 'cause that takes a lot of energy, too.

Developing new allergies sucks so much. and not in the fun kind of way, either.

broken bank windows and
shiny guillotines,
punk pins and patches and
worn vests made of jeans,
molotovs flying
while we seize the means
these are a few of
my FAVORITE THINGS 🤘

There’s a dude out here demonstrating with a REPENT OR PERISH sign. I’m changing into my most ostentatious gay pride ensemble and coming back.

The history of computing is a story of the “you must be at least this privileged to participate” bar ratcheting lower and lower across what is, culturally speaking, a short timescale - it took thirty years from computers to be a tool for wealthy specialists to bring a pocket-sized wireless communication device used by people worldwide, many of whom have little to no literacy in any language. Tech culture is stuck trying to catch up.

Open-source software’s roots are in an era of computing where using a computer was substantially more obnoxious, miserable, and arcane than it is now. A computer was largely impossible to use without some amount of programming skill, and networks were invented long before decent security was.

Out of this comes people who are very confident they could fix the problems in the slow, crappy, unreliable software they’re forced to use if only they were allowed to do so; some people got angry enough to write an operating system, while others designed a license agreement that would let people fix the software they use as long as they agree to let anybody else who uses it have the same freedom. It’s a practical solution to a very real problem faced by a small community: computer operators who resented paying thousands and thousands of dollars for support to fix bugs that were written by the companies they bought the software from for thousands more in the first place.

Now computers are genuinely usable by average people - at some cost. The most popular computers, by default, don’t let users run arbitrary software, and the “luxury brand” goes out of its way to not permit users to shut off this whitelist-only approach. Since the computer in question is an always-on battery-operated sensor package perpetually connected or trying to connect to wireless networks, there’s even some justification for this posture: users will click through literally anything to see the dancing cat, so no disclosure can ever stop a user from voluntarily installing malicious software. The result is that walled gardens are the most successful platforms we have today, and companies that once offered open platforms are closing them as the result of mass media attention to the consequences of open platforms, even with user intervention. (Chrome extensions and Gmail extensions are the examples in my mind there.)

The upshot to this is that “classic OSS” is not adequate to meet the needs of this population of users. It solves the same problem it always solved for highly skilled computer operators with unlocked devices and solves nothing for less-skilled users and users of walled garden devices.

What can we systematically invent to bring the benefits of OSS - “if it doesn’t do what you need, you can fix it” - to less skilled users and even users of walled garden devices? What license agreement, API standard, design standard, or organization could do this?

Demanding OSS developers write the features you want is exactly the opposite of what OSS is for, after all - OSS is designed for “you want it, you can write it yourself”; it’s freedom for developers to fix the software they use and not fix the software they wrote because if it really bothers someone, they can fix it themselves. This is useless to people without that skill, and I’d like to find a way to share the benefits, without creating a culture of “be angry at the person donating highly skilled labor because they didn’t do it specifically the way you need”.