20260915 Our tools are still broken
We can’t fix the tools we use until we properly own them - and we can properly own them.
Regular Reminder - Our tools Are Broken: social networking tools and other information infrastructure that are not publicly owned (and by that I mean licensed under the General Public License or Copylefted -see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft) are almost by definition fundamentally broken. Because anything less than public ownership severely limits the extent to which we can use, fix, experiment, and grow these into useful universal assets .. This is especially true in the long term.
The list of our broken tools include Facebook, Google search, Instagram, Twitter, and the operating systems Windows, Mac-OSX, IOS, and bits of Android. Linux is completely ours. Most of Android and the software that serves up and browses the world wide web is also properly public property.
Distributed/Federated social software that could easily replace Facebook, Instagram and Twitter already exists (see Mastodon, Friendica, Lemmy, Peertube, PixelFed … the Fediverse). Publicly owned search engines won’t have to start from scratch either.
Its just going to take us some time to realise that all the complaints that we have about our social software - about the abuses of power that extend from privacy violations to the manipulation of search results and manipulation of our social signalling - all of these cannot be fixed until we switch to Free (as in speech) Software.
Note, that public projects can be run as open foundations, also potentially funded by advertising, and the other models that fuel the platform capitalists - but with full transparency - so that users can choose the platforms that meet their ethical and privacy needs. Federated social software means that users will still be able to connect to each other, regardless of these choices.