I would argue the title implies “leaving the tech industry”, and in the beginning it says the article is for who wants to still work with the same skillset, but outside of the tech industry as in the companies who produce technology for profit. Probably only the tech co-op part can be said to be still within the tech industry

There’s plenty of neo-nazis in the Free Software movement. It’s “Free Software”, not “Free People”

it’s source available, and most of the code is public, but you cannot contribute or fork

it’s not open source

ok, CEO…

the logic that sending messages alters political reality is part of the overall problem. Politics is a conflict of forces, not a conflict of ideas or opinions. A license is as powerful as the will of the state power behind it to enforce it. Otherwise, it is powerless.

If you want to make sense of the political world, I invite to move beyond the idea of “taking stances” or expressing positions as a political act, and reason instead of what incentives and powers you’re altering with your political actions.

What you describe just does not play out in real life: neither on a micro scale nor on a macro scale.

The first line of the documentation is pretty clear: “Bonfire is an open-source framework for building federated digital spaces where people can gather, interact, and form communities online.”

You’re making this comment in a community named after a specific software ideology.

Positioning the project. Putting the project’s value before the tool it produces or the problem it solves is a specific stylistic choice. Just not in the software projects you’re usually involved in.

In open source circles, a technical description of what a tool does might be the norm, but in many other spaces, signaling your values and ideology is more important than the technicalities. For you it’s buzzwords, for other people it means a very specific positioning.

This is a good starting point: https://trent.mirror.xyz/GDDRqetgglGR5IYK1uTXxLalwIH6pBF9nulmY9zarUw

Licenses don’t stop bombs. In general, informational freedoms always benefits the stronger actor, because they already have the means to exploit the information better than other actors. Legal restrictions are just a bump in the road if what you produced is really really valuable for a corporation or a state entity: they can reimplement it, exploiting the design and “trial-and-error” work embedded in whatever you produced, or they can simply ignore licenses because nobody is going to ask the Israeli’s military to respect a license when they are slaughtering civilians.

Social problems never have technical solutions.

If you want to make software that is not captured by state or corporate power, you must create software that is incompatible with whatever they need to do. Embed a social logic that is worthless to their system but useful to our system. Anything else is eventually going to be captured. There’s a lot of literature on anti-capture design, and some of it manages to rise above the purely techno-optimist logic and provide something useful.

I know it’s a tough ask. In the meanwhile I’m exploring the possibility of embedding excalidraw into something else but I don’t know.

I already contribute to wikis on this topic, like Activist Handbook, but they are not the right format for what I need. Linked documents have limited expressivity and visual people are currently underserved, hence the diagram approach.

Another similar thing would be to use stuff like obsidian canvas which is something in between

because a media outlet goes where there are viewers. They write to be read, so there’s little benefit in going on platforms where there’s nobody.

You cannot fork or edit the code, it’s just “source-available”.

I think for your use case, Anytype is good enough, but it’s not FOSS. Obsidian is also not FOSS. I’m not a purist, quite the contrary (in fact I use Notion), but maybe you want to check what’s behind.

Also, to help you make sense of your confusion and take a better decision, you’re comparing a bit apples and oranges.

Some of the tools, like Obsidian, are purely knowledge-management software with some productivity features sticked on top (like kanban visualizations).

Coda, Appflowy and Notion are primarily tools to build software, which can be knowledge-management software, productivity software or other stuff. They operate on a higher level of abstraction and flexibility, but out-of-the-box, for a single user, they are also probably worse than stuff like Obsidian.

yey, more friends to chat with.

Well, Obsidian, Notion, Anytype, Affine can give you a hint of possible directions in this transition. While they still retain document-oriented features, like the concept of Page, they also try to really go for a much richer experience that does away with the limitations inherited from paper-based solutions. Double-linking, composability, fractal properties of pages and nesting (especially in Notion and Anytype), block-based UI, seamless integration of text, databases, and embeds, heavy use of transclusion and other stuff like that.

I would say this alternative system is far from cohesive and mature, but it’s clear some software is emancipating itself from whatever Onlyoffice represents.

Maybe you would find this video interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXiQlLHuK7g

I am sure that some people wouldn’t like the fact that the interface runs as a webapp, or use of Java, but it’s strange to me that it’s not usually even in the conversation.

A point about conversations, rather than the software itself. I think it’s not really at the forefront of the discussion because this kind of software caters kinda to “legacy” organizational environments that want a 1 to 1 replacement for Google Docs or Microsoft 365, which is not the sexiest problem. In the community of adopters of NextCloud (poor souls…) the discussion between onlyoffice and collabora, together with their integration with NC, is a quite common topic but again, most of these deal with orgs and not individual adoption and I would say that’s a very distinct crowd from most “hackerinos” who populate the FOSS online communities.

That said, a lot of the discourse is now focused on moving away entirely from document-based (and even document-oriented) software, because there’s a shared understanding that the problem is in the approach itself, and what IBM, Apple and Microsoft considered a reasonable way to handle information in the '80s, is not necessarily the best way now.

As somebody active in the politicization of tech workers, I see this as a great challenge to the stale narrative that tech workers are selfish, childish, passive. Both Luigi Mangione and Aaron Bushnel are tech workers and they are enough to prove a point.