gofoss

The most radical act in tech isn’t building something new. It’s keeping the old ideals alive: that people should control their tools, not the other way around.

For 15 years, F-Droid has been the antidote to Google Play: no trackers, no ads, just open source apps. Now, Google wants to kill it.

Under the guise of "security", Google is forcing devs to register, pay, and surrender control. F-Droid can’t comply without betraying its principles. Thousands of apps could vanish overnight.

Fight back: demand sideloading rights, pressure regulators/Parliament, and defend one of the safe harbors for ethical tech.

https://f-droid.org/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html

@marcprux@mastodon.social @fdroidorg@floss.social

Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Lemmy—you’re not perfect. Servers go down. Moderation gets messy. The UI can feel like a throwback to 2005. But you’re ours. No ads. No algorithms deciding what we see. No billionaire overlords. Just people, building spaces that answer to communities. Thanks ❤️

@Mastodon@mastodon.social
@peertube@framapiaf.org
@pixelfed@mastodon.social
@LemmyDev@mastodon.social

Mr. Doctorow's latest book lays out the AI bubble's inevitable pop. Let's hope, against all odds, that he's wrong this time...

"The most important thing about AI isn't its technical capabilities or limitations. The most important thing is the investor [...] mania that has teed up an economical catastrophe."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

@pluralistic@mamot.fr

We all see it: the monetization, polarization, and slow rot of the Internet. Yet we keep scrolling—because everyone else does.

Phones, PCs and apps aren’t just making tech billionaires richer. They’re the infrastructure of control. We hand authoritarians the tools to rig elections, crush dissent, and reshape societies in the dark.

The issue isn’t technology. It'policy. And it’s all of us, silently feeding the beast.

Time to starve the algorithms.

Join https://gofoss.net

Welp, maybe it *is* about more than just software.

Resist, unsubscribe.

https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/

#resistandunsubscribe

@divVerent@misskey.de @aral@mastodon.ar.al aral pls correct me, the way I took your comment is that we are not "users" but "people", as in humans. Which I can only agree with - so this edit feels right to me. Power to the people! (not the users 😉)

@mro@digitalcourage.social Thanks a lot, I didn't know about Mr. Illich. Very very relevant to this day

@squishymage42@dice.camp @pluralistic@mamot.fr Yes, the AI bubble will burst. Yes, there will be wreckage. But let’s not pretend the ‘pieces to pick up’ are just lying there for the taking—history shows who gets to salvage, and who gets left in the rubble. The real question isn’t if this grift collapses, but how we dismantle it without letting the innocent pay. Again.

@nihongomaamaa@mastodon.ie @pluralistic@mamot.fr Another economic collapse won’t just burn the speculators. It’ll torch the people already running on fumes: the underpaid, the overworked, the ones who never got a seat at the table. The architects of this mess will pivot to the next grift. Boom-and-bust cycles aren't justice. Just another way the powerful pass the bill to those who can’t afford it.

@martyh@cobolworx.social Thanks for making this happen! Blessed be the maintainers. People, not the code, are the real legacy

@alcinnz@floss.social yeah well, blame the bloat... Optimization used to be an art, nowadays code is buried under layers of telemetry, ads, and "engagement" slop. A single Chrome tab chews through more resources than NASA had for the moon landing

@MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org haha ;) with all due respect, some of the world’s most enshittified tools...

@aral@mastodon.ar.al better now ;)

@Ekyllier@mastodon.online Sure, I get that. But is it worth it? Corpos offering "free" "convinient" "features" inflict real pain in this world. Their idea of growth and innovation (aka profit and control) clashes with old tech ideals. Software shouldn’t come with strings attached. Free as in freedom means you control the terms.