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Happy Software Freedom Day [16th of September 2023] (www.softwarefreedomday.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Looks like a really nice and useful initiative.

Suggestion to the owners of the SFD webpage

I would appreciate the SFD initiative even more, if on the SFD webpage you would "live by your own words".

Facebook and the blue bird are by no means free software, also not according to your definitions "free to study [how the program works]", "free to distribute [copies]", "free to modify [the software]", "free to access [the source code]".

So why not at least show the benefits and use FOSS social media alternatives in action?
If you need the momentum of the unfree social media, you still could do this additionally.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's why we specifically mentioned Fediverse and FOSS alternatives to get the word out about Software Freedom Day here: https://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/SFDMarketingSites The DFF board discussed this topic and wants to continue to reach out to people who don't know about FOSS and the Fediverse. So, we are trying to meet them where they are and let them know about the benefits of using FOSS. Also, one of the groups did a talk on switching from X to Mastodon: https://mobilizon.fr/events/1ab64af3-b99e-473d-87da-7ad07497ab41 If you have suggestions for the web site, please join the SFD discussion mailing list and add your input. The new DFF board will be redesigning the entire site for next year, but did not have time to do so for the 20th edition of Software Freedom Day. Their main goal was making sure that we still had a Software Freedom Day this year after the old board stepped down.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thank you for your detailed explanation and the wiki link 🙂. Good to hear that this (side-) topic is on the agenda.

As mentioned, I really appreciate your work around education and awareness of FOSS principles and chances
and I wish you a nice (remaining) Software Freedom Day.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Hey Marv, thanks for the critical eyes. You are completely right. Currently our websites are in dire need of updating. The current design was made before Mastodon even existed. The first years of its existence, it also wasn't clear yet what open platform would break through... (there were a lot of experiments in that period - all of which had a lot of potential... think of WT.social for example). Then came lockdown (and the board also suffered a great loss when one of them lost his life in an accident). In July of this year (so roughly 2 months ago) we lmemsm, myself and a few other persons offered to take up the task of coordinating the DFF and prepare Software Freedom Day. If you'll have a look at https://digitalfreedomfoundation.org ... you'll notice that we didn't even get around to updating the about page. We put all hand on deck to launch Software Freedom Day and find some great campaigns. We reached out and got the support from the FSF and MuseScore - some other organizations were also very supportive, but we arrived there too late.

We have an extensive TODO-list, and for the moment our NextCloud Deck has one item in the column "Quick wins" -> "add Mastodon link". We can also use extra helping hands, so I'd gladly invite you (and everyone else here) over to our Matrix channel to help on preparing the 2024 edition of Hardware Freedom Day, Software Freedom Day and Document Freedom Day. Your help will be much appreciated.

So yes - we should be putting stuff like Mastodon, Lemmy, Diaspora and Matrix more front and center. At the same time zealously restricting ourselves to only communicate over these channels would be preaching for the choir. If we want to educate people about the power of FOSS, we need to be where they are. So that'll be on Facebook, Twitter an LinkedIn. I am proud to say though that the rate of activity on Mastodon (even compared to those other platforms) was heartwarming en huge! I'm impressed with how much Mastodon has grown over the last year.