So? Is your alternative free of mistakes and bias?

I don’t need opposing views on subjects, I need the most accurate one that’s the best researched and sourced.

Besides still needing to establish that a) wikipedia is bad today (as opposed to just flawed), you also need to establish b) what about this would entice people over from wikipedia and c) if it did succeed, then why wouldn’t whoever got into positions of power with wikipedia get into the same positions of power on the biggest instances?

There’s no equivalent to a licensed civil engineer in programming.

It’s literally called a software engineer in most jurisdictions that aren’t America where anyone is allowed to call themselves that. And software engineers also have to take engineering ethics, both courses in university as well as in their final professional exams if they want to call themselves engineers.

Why do you keep adding new parameters to these analogies? It’s such a simple concept but you are determined to prove your opinion, that the devs should acquiesce to your point of view, no matter what.

You’re the one who added the “posted online” parameter. I responded and pointed out that it doesn’t matter to the analogy.

If you put something dangerous into the world, mark it “ready to use”, and encourage people to use it, and that results in them getting hurt or hurting others, then that is a bad thing and you have an obligation to fix it or warn people.

It’s such a simple concept but you are determined to prove your opinion, that the devs should acquiesce to your point of view, no matter what.

You’re right about it being a simple concept, I don’ understand where you think I’m demanding anyone do anything. The devs have already acquiesced after the community overwhelmingly dumped on their response. My only point has been that it’s not entitled to expect a developer to put a warning on software once they’ve been alerted that it’s dangerous.

Again, you are narrowing the definition of “obligation” to just legal and contractual.

If you just want to think about yourself and how you interact with the world through legal and contractual terms, good luck, it will be hard and miserable and you will be disliked. Otherwise you do have moral, ethical, and social obligations for everything you put into society.

Nope, it’s my moral, ethical, and social obligation as a person, my professional obligation as a professional software developer, and if I had bothered to file the paper work for my engineering license, would also be my legal obligation as an engineer.

Again, that does not matter. If an engineer published those plans online and you built it and your kid died they would have their license revoked and face likely criminal liability.

All I have an obligation to do is give back to society, and I do so through taking care of my parents and grandparents, volunteering teaching classes every weekend at the community center, volunteering to upgrade and maintain an app for a non profit, donating to charity, open source projects and news organizations, helping my elderly neighbours with their snow and leaf clearing, etc.

And if you find one of my open source github projects will cause a user to violate a local law, kindly file an issue and I’ll immediately update the README.md and take it down until the issue is fixed.

I understand having frayed nerves, I even understand snapping at someone because you’re having a bad day, and I do feel sympathy for the devs, and wouldn’t hold this against them (especially since they’re at least providing a nuke everything option that will address it).

But the line between entitlement and reasonable expectation is not one of monetary compensation.

Engineering ethics does not let you off the hook just because no one paid you to build what you built. If an engineer goes to the park and unilaterally builds a playground that doesn’t meet basic legislated safety standards and kills a kid, they’re not off the hook. They will be investigated by their professional body and have their license revoked.

Hell if they just build a playground off in the woods on their own private land but don’t take reasonable steps to prevent kids from accessing or using it then they will have their license revoked.

The word obligation is not as narrow as you’re using it:

obligation /ŏb″lĭ-gā′shən/

noun A social, legal, or moral requirement, such as a duty, contract, or promise, that compels one to follow or avoid a particular course of action. “Are you able to meet your obligations?” “I have an obligation to attend their wedding.”

Does he have a contractual obligation? No, no contracts were signed. Does he have a legal obligation? No, the license file in the project absolves him of legal liability.

But he absolutely has a moral, social, and professional obligation to do so.

There are zero obligations towards the people actively using the software.

Yes, there are, and that obligation is to not publish something as production ready if it is illegal to use because of how it’s built.

I’m a software developer, I understand exactly how frustrating user demands are, that was still a completely and utterly unacceptable way to respond to a very politely worded request for software that literally just doesn’t break privacy laws to run.

As the commenter pointed out, if you don’t want to fix it, fine, but then you absolutely have a moral, ethical, and professional obligation to document that clearly in your README.md.

It is not entitled to expect a published project to comply with basic privacy legislation and not be illegal to use.

If your bar for this project is that much below basic consumer expectations, then this project was always going to fail.

Have you learned how to program to fix the problem?

It doesn’t seem worth my time to learn Rust just to submit a PR to devs who behave like that, they’ll just reject it and be pithy, like they are when a user asks them to comply with EU privacy law.

The entire point of the “fediverse” is to combat the network effect.

No, it’s not.

The purpose of the fediverse is to decentralize control of the network, it does not eliminate network effects in any way shape or form. At the end of the day a social network is only as valuable as the users using it and contributing content to it. If they don’t find lemmy pleasant to use, they’re not going to say “let me jump to mastodon” they’re going to go to Reddit.

Build one or wait for someone to build one you like.

You really don’t understand network effects if you think you can just sit around and wait for basic functionality and expect your network not to die.

You don’t know how social networks work. They only survive based on network effects, if they don’t have the most basic functionality that users expect (like complying with privacy legislation), then they will fail to reach critical mass and be outcompeted and die.

If the devs don’t want to provide the most basic functions that any user of a social network would expect, they’re welcome to be downvoted to hell and have their project go back to being one of the millions of forgotten and unviewed personal github projects.

Open source projects die because it takes both technical talent and attention to your users to make a project successful, and for-profit companies often pay different people to do those.

We’re not talking about a user demanding you release a flatpak build targeting their personal linux distribution running in a VM’d WSL, we’re talking about a consumer facing social app that doesn’t include the functionality for a user to delete something they added.

You know what the acronym used for describing the most basic functional web app api is?

CRUD - Create, Read, Update, Delete

Extend ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse with a very-usable app that provides additional functionality (initially the ability to follow everybody you’re following on Instagram, and to communicate with all Threads users) that isn’t available to the rest of the fediverse

That’s already available to Threads users regardless of whether or not they federate.

as well over time providing additional services and introducing incompatibilities and non-standard improvements to the protocol

kk, then defederate from them when that happens.

Exploit ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse by utilizing them for profit – and also using them selfishly for Meta’s own ends

This is a nonsense sentence that says nothing and makes no actual tangible point.

This is nothing but more hysteria.

You are arguing retroactively. Back then was a vastly different situation, and you really seem to be too young to understand that.

Stop being a gatekeeping asshat, you have no idea how old I was, and it’s patronizing and dumb as shit to claim that someone is young just cause they experienced a time period differently from you. Your memory and perception is not an infallible perfect record of major corporate and consumer trends.

You are arguing retroactively.

YES. Because we are not talking about what is going to happen with Lemmy. We’re talking about what DID happen with XMPP and Google Talk. We have the benefit of hindsight, and seeing that Jabber did not matter one iota compared to Gmail. If it did, you would be able to ask any person old enough to remember Jabber what they thought of it. You know what you’ll get? Blank stares.

Gmail and Google Talk had millions of users, XMPP only had millions of users when Google Talk decided to keep it alive by supporting it.

That Google Talk would have taken all those users and become the dominant chat platform over XMPP based ones, regardless of whether or not they used XMPP to start with. Google Talk was always going to outcompete Jabber / AOL / MSN messenger because those platforms stopped investing in user facing features.

You yourself said that the vast majority of users did not care about what protocol they used. They cared about using the chat app with the most user friendly interface, which was Google Talk.

XMPP is an implementation protocol, not a user facing feature.