I was going to post this as a comment, but I was replying to such a small part of the original article that I wanted to make a new article to hold my thoughts. This relates to Techrights/Boycottnovell – Bane or boon? An experience by Manish Sinha
Actually I don’t find any reason to be on identi.ca. Just because it runs FOSS? Identi.ca is the smaller brother of twitter which lacks wit and sarcasm. There is no humour in any dents. Twitter community rocks. identi.ca community needs to improve themselves. StatusNet software for running identi.ca is great, but that hardly matters if you don’t have a good community.
I wanted to pass some links on how identi.ca is sort of usless, but I would reserve them for further use.
You know that feeling when you read something that a friend wrote and it’s just so arrogant and condescending, that it makes you want to slap your forehead at how they could have possibly let such a statement pass their internal editor. Yea, that’s how I feel about this statement.
Personally I’ve never been a fan of identi.ca or twitter. But it grinds my nerves when normally affable people start beating on identi.ca or other FOSS online ’services’ simply because as a individual it doesn’t deliver what they personally need at this particular time or the community they’ve associated themselves with are jerks.
This complaint they have normally starts with a failure of a network effect in the normally more desirable FOSS solution. And there isn’t usually much we can do about that except try to encourage more use. though we do have mitigating technologies; all those broadcast apps and built-into-the-desktop solutions for posting to multiple services? Those exact solutions should make it trivial for Ubuntu Members to be involved on multiple services or at least just make sure things are posted multiple places.
So far I’ve found most people do do just that. When I use broadcast, I do that. It just feels right to give services like identi.ca a chance and to be patient with FOSS services. Especially those tied so heavily to network effects. The other problem to do with jerks? Just don’t subscribe to anyone. I really don’t care that much what anyone has to say in their micro-blogging. If you can’t be bothered to spend the time writing a blog post then you obviously don’t have anything valuable to say *touch in cheek warning because some people don’t get humour*. But if you’re not like me and you like hearing what some people have to say and not others, as far as I know identi.ca doesn’t force you to subscribe to every ubuntu user registered.
I manage a number of communities, trust me, I understand that it’s really great to make good friends on closed networks. I get it. But that doesn’t mean that we need be quite so mean spirited about people who make friends on other more FOSS friendly networks. It’s just as extreme as those who want to force everyone to use only FOSS by martyrdom.
Your thoughts?