So like many tech enthusiasts, I have been dipping my toes into the FOSS space in light of recent events, and then completely running away at the water is completely harsh, abrasive, and filled with sewage half the time. I know some smartass is going to come in here and say like, Obsidian is proprietary! shut up i don't care. you know exactly what i mean

It's like, if you entered a bathhouse and were like, hey the water here is really cold? I'm having trouble adjusting, and instead of a bath house attendee offering you some towels and adjusting the water, you get told to shut up and read the signage, except the signage is several paragraphs long in tiny text, and doesn't address your query. You go to someone in the bathhouse and ask, hey how did you adjust here? And they reply that they love the bath house they just need a full body wetsuit to tolerate the water but really it helps them a lot. You ask how much the wetsuit was and they respond, hundreds of dollars, which makes you say well.... But the bathhouse is supposed to be free isn't it? And they say, well I'm saving money in the long run though while they spend an hour forcing themselves into the wetsuit which clearly doesn't fit.

And then I sigh and go back to paid bathhouse where there's a non-minimal chance to catch a disease but at least they keep the water at a decent temperature and there's towels.

I am not what you would consider completely tech illiterate nor am I lazy, I have won a few hackathons, I worked in corporate tech, my name online is torrent-empress for fuck's sake. I am not a LinkedIn-pilled MBA bro (although I have dabbled in the past in the tapdance for jobs). I am actually fairly horrified at the amount of people in my specific industry of User experience who do not understand basic programming or even play video games or know how to use Zoom. There's a learned helplessness epidemic within corporate tech that makes their open-mouth kiss and embrace with GenAI tech completely unsurprising, if infuriating, to me.

But fuck I gotta admit FOSS people are more annoying to me.

Maybe it's because I'm a historical materialist, but I don't believe in morality. I've moved 30 times in my life, I've seen all types of people do a lot of fucked up things, read a lot of history. I believe in free will, but I don't believe that most people get to exercise it to the extent that they want to. The only thing that exists to me, is material conditions. Can you eat? Can you shit safely? Is there a roof under your head and how do you do it? That's the base of all of our decisions and if you think otherwise it's because you're privileged enough to engage in the politics of morality like it has a functional effect on society. Racism doesn't happen because "of skin color" it happens because of resource acquisition and labor conflict. Sexism is a product of agricultural development in human history needing lots of workers to tend the fields not innate differences in the sexes. If you think otherwise, you probably got fooled into thinking the US invading Afghanistan was about freedom.

If you're reading this, you probably are a Bluesky visitor. You might even also use mastodon, now, go and say "I don't really like mastodon" on bluesky and like bloody Mary a random masto enthusiast will appear in your mentions to tell you are wrong, that you just aren't using their arcane bullshit software right, like a guy hitting on you that's pissed you aren't reciprocating before it disintegrates into barely veiled insults about how you are a moral infidel against a free and sovereign Internet and beholden to licking the boot of big tech.

You're not negging me into using mastodon I'd rather eat rocks have fun, genuinely.

Foss people are like, allergic to UX or something.

Overwhelmingly white, upper middle class+, and AMAB the FOSS community seems confused, why can't it attract more adherents? They got it, so obviously, every other person the planet can right?

It's clearly an issue of willpower, if they just keep annoying everyone to death, they'll get it.

Take the case of the One Laptop Per child project - as catalogued in this great book called the charisma machine in which a bunch of FOSSbros thought that if they simply dropped off open source laptops in impoverished countries in the third world, the children would lift themselves out of poverty by learning to code and the world would have their FOSS revolution - except that didn't happen at all. The entire project top to bottom was a failure. The children didn't take to the laptops as hoped.

Eventually they had to institute instruction which also didn't address many problems (like lack of internet and electrical infrastructure) and the project eventually petered out despite multiple government's support. Even the children that did take to the laptop and tech, as one Uruguayan child did, was not encouraged because she was girl and left out of events in which she was qualified for. Years later they had even followed up with her to find she had never escaped poverty and given up on learning tech. (That one made me tear up quite a bit)

Most of the children just watched anime and played games on theirs, and who can blame them. Me too man.

Much of the problem was that they hadn't really included much of the people they intended to design for in their plans, you know, the actual poor people and kids? They didn't consider that many people didn't have electricity at home much less Internet, that they might not have literate parents or family, they didn't have much of the needed support to even consider programming as hobby and feared taking apart these strange boxes as there weren't easily accessible spare parts, or tools, or books. If their laptop fell, it would likely fall onto a concrete or dirt floor.

After this collosal failure of project that had international backing from advocates like MIT inspired by Paulo Friere in the early 00s you'd have thought maybe someone somewhere down the line in the FOSS movement might've learned something but alas, no.

See, this is a critical moment for the FOSS movement, at a time where the tech industry is completely imploding and users are most primed into accepting or trying things like Linux.

and the FOSS community is not up to the task

Let's keep it 100% the FOSS community is terrible

Go and look up FOSS, or linux, or on youtube and you will see a 99% white community of primarily cishet men and a smattering of asians and trans folks. Very rarely black, or indigenous, or latino people (that aren't mixed with white, you're more likely to find a Nick Fuentes type than anything else.) Go into discords and forums asking common questions and you will be hit with a "RTFM" (Read the fucking manual) often. Referring to whatever horribly written dense screed of (often woefully outdated) documentation vaguely strung together with dense technical wording.

Talk to any FOSS acolyte about something and the conversation will often go like this:

You: I'm having a problem with [proprietary software], I'm really frustrated.

Them: scoffs I don't have that problem because I use a custom rom dinglebop shitfuck linux distro that allows me to [technical jargon that you don't know or care about]

You: uhm, okay. Could you give me a recommendation that'll allow me to replicate my workflow in [proprietary program] ?

Them: Uhm yeah (sends you a program that is incredibly hard to set up and cannot replicate your workflow at all)

You: I don't really understand how this works?
Them: okay well post in the discord

You: posts in discord Uhm people were just really rude to me and told me to just read the forums.... I watched some tutorials but they're all like 2 hours long and this is a lot of information.

Them: You're just using it wrong, you're not supposed to replicate your workflow from another program.

You: then why am I using this?!

Them: Because proprietary software is bad duh!

You: you just wasted several days of my time, I'm just gonna go back to proprietary software

Them: But don't you care about OPEN DATA AND FREEDOM??? You're dumb and wasting your own time

Me: hell fucking no lmao and now I'm going to sell my soul to Apple and Google explicitly just to piss you off for wasting my time.

What is User Experience? (Because apparently nobody in this movement fucking knows)

User Experience is not about building products that adhere to your personal ideological standpoints, cultural touchstones, and interests. It's about filling a need for users and figuring out the best ways for users to actually accomplish what they need to do. Not about, data freedom, or whatever your political pet project is. People have commissions to fill, jobs to do.

Often when you talk to FOSSheads, you break down their arguments over and over about why you should use their software despite the fact that it sucks to fucking use, you would have to completely change the way you work, and after enough questioning they almost always end up meekly leaning on, "Well I like it because I like tinkering and it's fun to me"

IT'S NOT ABOUT YOUUUUUUUUU

That's the mindset that keeps Linux at 3% global adoption rate, that's the mindset that keeps Canva/Adobe the choice of editing and creative work over Davinchi resolve or GIMP.

That is not how User Experience works! That's not how any of this works! I'M NOT FUCKING OPENING UP THE TERMINAL AND HAVING A LIST OF COMMANDS, BITCH PUT THAT SHIT INTO THE FUCKING GUI OR I'M NOT FUCKING USING IT.

It is not shilling to expect good user experience and to understand that it often costs money.

First: Let me just say that I really and truly appreciate the people that work hard to build open-source software, especially the ones that use their own funds to put things together - for the community, programmers and others.

Okay, now that that's out the way, y'all are doing this as a hobby often times. I know there are companies that put out FOSS, but primarily contributions are added by the community for free, for the love of the game. That is great, but, it introduces bias. The people most likely to have the resources to contribute free labor to specialized software are likely more likely to be educated, upper class people, who are designing primarily for themselves and have not done the research and work to understand the needs of a greater community at large.

You know how a lot of modders in skyrim and big games like that crash out? And it's due to the fact that they often cannot deal with criticism, a community of expectations, and constant requests for help... and they're often not getting paid at market rates to do so...?

You know where I'm going with this.

I would rather pay someone a fair rate to protect the mental health of the people doing this work than watch them break down over time as the needs of a growing community rapidly outpace the amount of contributors that can give free development labor on a timely basis as the userbase increasingly relies on programs for their own economic development. Point blank period.

A team of just 5 programmers could easily top 500k a year, add in some UX designers, QA people, and researchers and we're talking into the millions pretty quickly. Then add admin, HR, y'know taxes, and boom. You got a multi-million dollar company, every OS update, every new type of device needs to be accounted for. Windows releases a gigantic bug riddled update? You need someone to man the hundreds of thousands of reports and emails.

Notion vs Obsidian vs Anytype: Please fucking kill me

With a lot of talk around disinvesting from big companies, I thought to myself. Hell I support BDS (haven't had mcdonalds in like months), why not at least try here. I've been paying notion for so long, it's where my second brain lives. I see so many people talking about Obsidian, so maybe it's time to try, this is a very sensitive thing for me. My personal notes and organization are something that I take mortally seriously, but I am dedicated to doing the best that I can, and hell I'm thinking of making the move to linux now that Proton is making big waves (thank you daddy Gabe). I also cannot fucking stand Notion AI being shoved into every crevice in the fucking service. However, Obsidian sucks. I just, hated it.

Yeah I did all the things, I tried to give it plug-ins up the ass, I tried changing the colors, but I could not replicate my workflow in notion. I don't like the pure markdown structure in part because I never memorized markdown and probably won't, it's not a priority in my life.

Then I looked for a REAL alternative in Anytype, the closest alternative to notion. It has a block editor and everything!

For a moment, I thought I found a real savior. I thought, maybe this is it, maybe I'm free. They said it was an object oriented whatever the fuck and I'm like yeah, yeah sure whatever. it let me drag and drop the blocks. I cannot tell you how important it is that you let me drag and drop the blocks and resize them.

Close enough, I say. and then try to keep working, but then an issue... I start losing pages. I keep trying to drag them to the side bar but I can't figure out how to make the side bar work. things start to get lost, this isn't like notion as much as I thought, I start to panic..... I go watch their developer townhall, Surely they're going to be working on this. I see great things about data as an estate, an idea I really like. That's great, except the roadmap is more focused on AI and a fucking CHAT feature more than anything else, like making it so breadcrumbs of what things are nested in are usable.

I start softly sobbing. I'm losing my fucking mind. I lose it and start looking for an extension or something that can make the genslop garbage out of notion. I didn't delete my account, I didn't even cancel my subscription, there's still time.

suddenly, I see my savior in a reddit threat complaining about notion AI

and so there I was, like Carrie at Mr.Big's apartment, waiting to be let back in

within minutes, like my toxic ex, they replied like nothing had ever happened. And I couldn't help but wonder, why had I ever bothered with this open source shit again?

and just like that, I was finally free. And hey, they even added the one fucking feature everyone's been asking for since the service was started.

and I got right back to re-doing my space again!

Merry fucking christmas to me, minus that stupid GenSlop bullshit.

Conclusion: I want to like you open source stuff, you just suck too much.

I mean hey, there's some great open source programs I like! Uhhhhhh VLC :) and, utorrent...? Oh wait that's not open source anymore!

Well that's close enough, look I do appreciate and want to encourage people to try FOSS where possible, y'all might find something you like! I wish that more FOSS teams would ask for UX and product volunteering, I've helped out on a project or two and helped them quite a bit. Sometimes you need someone to ask you to concisely explain your product in one sentence and how it beats the competition. Look like, I'm not dedicated to my Mr.Big, really I'm a Samantha actually.

I tried, I really really did.

So it's gotta be said to the FOSS community

UX is not optional, it's a core part of the apps and programs that you put out to the public. Users don't have to use your app and they won't, because there's for every FOSS app that's supposed to be a proprietary killer it gets immediately undercut by another proprietary app that just... sucks less. I'm on ATprotocol not Activitypub for a reason, sorry. I still don't give a shit how it works, on a personal level because it works, I can actually find people. I get followers.

I'm not going to use bad things that refuse to get better because y'all want to design for yourselves, but I'll always try out a new app or program because hey!

OBS is pretty useful. I like some of the gif editors I've found. I have my own website in case all of this shit goes down, I'm hip to the game.

But I'm going to be honest, I think this whole "well what if [insert service here] goes down" is a really silly and stupid idea, yeah Google could die tomorrow, but I've had 6 android phones that have died before then that I was able to back up through my google account. The average hard drive only lasts a decade at best.

I know y'all wanna pretend people who don't have your specific very white permutation of autism don't exist, but I have AuDHD and I just, lose shit. I'm not going to remember to back shit up, I'm just not.

I'll sign every petition, I'll go with you to congress, or to the city/states for better laws. I'll help you teach classes, I'll fill out every survey for improvement, but I'm not keeping a god damn server in my home.

Until y'all can get it together, this is where I'm at: