Comment on Leaving GitHub. Music server alternatives?
FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world 18 hours agoOkay. I think we agree on more than we disagree.I also appreciate your input on effective strategy on serious issues like this - I 100% agree. I think you’ve misinterpreted me a little, so let me clarify:
- I support BDS actively. Organised movements are vital.
- As I’ve said in the comments: perfect is the enemy of the good. I will drop as many projects as I can. Media players, web browsers, mail clients, social platforms - can all be changed for more ethical alternatives. It doesn’t have to be black or white.
- I will never wait for any individual or group to give me the go ahead to do what I think is the right thing. BDS isn’t perfect.
- I am not selling anything, or trying to temper my actions to be more palatable to the more hesitant . It also turns out that I’m far from alone in this, but I was equally happy to go first. I don’t think that it’s a waste of effort at all.
So, yes, strategy is important. But personal efforts count too. Among other things, I am challenging the widely held apathy (and empathy deficit) held by tech enthusiasts that such a move is pointless or too difficult. And along the way I am finding likeminded people I didn’t know were out there.
communism@lemmy.ml 14 hours ago
I think you’re still avoiding the point:
The point isn’t that you have to follow the BNC specifically. The point is that announcing you’re not using any software hosted on GH, on a small social media platform, is far from organising a boycott. If you are serious about organising a boycott, that is what you do in the movement, with the masses. As it currently stands, you are simply making a personal consumer decision.
Personally, I don’t think it’ll be possible for this to become a mass boycott (which it needs to in order to have effect), just because you’re going to struggle to explain to everyone what GitHub even is let alone how to boycott any software that’s hosted on it. That’s why the demand to boycott GitHub ie not host your own software on there is far easier; that only applies to people who make software, who do know what GitHub is and understand how to not use it. If you don’t know what GitHub is then you’re already boycotting it. Meanwhile, your version of the boycott requires teaching people what git is, what a git repo is, and what a git forge is, and then giving them a very long list of software that they need to boycott in order to join you. For the reasons that BDS explains in terms of their tactic of targeted boycotts, that’s not going to work, because in practice very few people will boycott the full list of software and everyone will boycott a few GitHub repos and those repos will be different for each person.
At the end of the day, boycotting is a political strategy to force change through. It’s not about showing how moral you are. If you can’t get a critical mass of people with you, your consumer decision is as impactful as your decision of what shirt to wear today.
That’s still avoiding the real problem of defining strict boundaries for your boycott. It is still entirely unclear to me how I could join you even if I wanted to. What are you proposing we boycott? I adhere to BDS, who have given pretty unambiguous guidelines on how to boycott. Even their Microsoft boycott accounts for “do as much as you can”; they acknowledge that some people will be forced to use MS products, and encourage people to move away from them unless they have no choice. That’s understandable enough and the average person knows exactly how to join that boycott if they want to.
Like I said, if you’re serious about this, you need to go somewhere other than Lemmy. And if you’re not serious about this, then stop pretending you’re making a political decision, and accept that you are just making a personal consumer preference.