
Introducing Librem Social - kgwxd
https://puri.sm/posts/introducing-librem-social/
======
farisjarrah
I remain hopeful that projects like this are a way for commercial interests to
funnel money and development to the upstream open source project owners.
Purism talks a big game about being a social purpose company. Lets see if they
can follow through with their self-imposed commitments. Thus far, it does seem
like some the greater mobile gtk toolchain has benefited as result of these
efforts on the librem phone, but that's a pretty small niche right there. It
doesn't seem like they are integrating with the upstream projects as much for
these social/communication services as much as they are with their mobile
stuff.

~~~
kgwxd
I think the reason they're not integrating upstream on the social stuff as
much is because they've removed more than added. They do less, on purpose. I
like that their Mastodon instance doesn't have the firehose. It seems to help
keep peoples posts more diverse and personal and avoids people feeling like
they have to pick a side and comment on whatever is #trending today. If they
gave the option to turn on the firehose, it would loose that feel because many
of the users would fall into the same trap. Even if they still post
interesting stuff, their overall feed could be lower quality.

------
gcb0
I loved purism. Got their laptops. But the OS and most software (and i am sure
this social network too) is a fly-by-night operation. At best!

The laptops too, in a way. They are nice but for the price should have been
nicer (e.g. no USB C charging or monitor out, etc, for a machine more
expensive than a maxed out mac or HP). Everything they do just scream "we
slapped those things together. Now pay us".

Now they are riding the waves of the librem5 hype... and i am sure they will
deliver just because the competition on mobile phones is abysmal.

------
newnewpdro
I heard this is a sort of hail-mary for the company's existence, that they
need recurring revenue and need it badly.

Their products haven't been selling well and if you look at the last few
puri.sm updates posted on HN they didn't even attract 10 comments if any at
all.

The last macbook update thread was past 1000 comments when I read it.

If the HN crowd isn't interested in a privacy-oriented FSF-friendly computing
devices, who is?

~~~
kgwxd
I think people here are interested in the Librem 5. Laptops are already easy
enough to make your own with just a few compromises, and I don't think many
people would choose PureOS over other Linux distros. But the phone space has 3
choices iOS, Google Android and open Android (e.g. LineageOS). The open
Android options are forced to run on fairly locked down hardware made by
companies that have no interest in open sourcing anything and don't want any
hardware buttons, no matter how useful they might be. There's a desperate need
for a mobile device made for general purpose computing.

------
grizzles
Are these apps open source? I'm curious to see if they changed mastodon in any
meaningful way.

~~~
egypturnash
From what I hear they took out all the moderation tools.

edit: ah, here's the commit which does it.
[https://source.puri.sm/liberty/smilodon/commit/9cae431902a2c...](https://source.puri.sm/liberty/smilodon/commit/9cae431902a2c0ce6438c6722a3a901e279c78fc)

"\- Return error from reports REST API \- Remove links to report in web UI \-
Reject reports from ActivityPub"

(which is to say, if you're using it, the 'report' functionality is gone, and
if someone on a remote instance hits the 'report' button on a toot from Purism
and says 'send this report to my admin and Purism's admin' then Purism will
just error out instead of accepting the error.)

I really dunno what possessed Eugen to think that was a good idea. Apparently
this commit has been reverted but I've still defederated my instance from
Purism because who the hell knows when they'll think this sounds like a good
plan again?

~~~
jancsika
I don't understand why you'd have to dig through another instance's git
history and make a judgment call based on a reverted implementation detail.

Doesn't Mastodon have tools to notify the admin or even temporarily defederate
based on X number of user reports from a given instance?

~~~
egypturnash
"Purism's instance removed all moderation tools" is the reason I have an
opinion on them at all. I only realized they reverted that when linking to the
commit where they broke it for my previous comment.

I might change my mind on defederating them if the users of my instance weigh
in, but forty years of growing up along with the Internet has given me a
rather jaundiced view of the ability of people whose primary concerns are
___software_ __freedom __* to make sensible moderation decisions. Especially
when they 've started from a position of "we can completely opt out of
moderating our social software, it'll be great, I'm sure everyone will behave
like adults" and had to be argued out of that.

------
burntoutcase
Fair warning to anybody thinking of using Librem Social: it's a Mastodon
instance whose management seems willing to tolerate speech that most of the
rest of the Fediverse finds objectionable. Don't expect that you'll be able to
interact with users of other Mastodon instances, as their admins may refuse to
federate with Librem Social.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The "main" mastodon.social instance isn't choosing to ban them at this time:
[https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/102180995301556021](https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/102180995301556021)

Also, from the article: "If you are being harassed, or witness online
harassment, block and flag the offending user and a moderator will take
action. We do not tolerate harassment. This is an area of well-established
rights, Librem Social is built on and with the expert policies of ACLU, FSF,
and EFF, while avoiding the pitfalls of ham-fisted censorship we all dislike
from Big Tech."

And the link to their Code of Conduct is here:
[https://librem.one/conduct/](https://librem.one/conduct/)

Some elements of the Mastodon community are a bit... extreme in their views on
moderation, but it doesn't seem like Purism is going outside the standard
faire here.

~~~
knolax
>The "main" mastodon.social instance

mastodon.social isn't even the largest mastodon instance[0]. Even aside from
that The majority of active accounts are hosted on small or personal
instances, especially for English speaking accounts.

>extreme in their views on moderation

IIRC instance admins had an issue with the purism instance not actively going
against hate-speech. I'd hardly call that extremist.

[0]From [https://instances.social/list](https://instances.social/list)

Instance Users

DOWN pawoo.net 549417

DOWN mastodon.social 321500

DOWN mstdn.jp 191718

UP switter.at 118232

~~~
lone_haxx0r
It isn't extreme, statistically speaking, but at least it isn't what I would
want in a social network. If I wanted a heavily censored network I would just
use Twitter.

