It seems you’ve responded to a refusal to subscribe with an argument for willingness to pay. It is possible to be open to payment and not to subscription.
HN is filled with people bemoaning subscription software. Subscriptions, whether to software or news, shift power toward sellers and invite dark patterns for its abuse.
That abuse is well enough recognized to be the subject of an often celebrated (on HN) CA law attempting to make subscription less odious.
As I said: the message is rather inarticulate, so I wouldn't read too much into it.
But, although in general I dislike subscription models, they do make sense for newspapers. If they were to switch to "pay per article", it won't be long before the bean counters step in and turn the focus of the paper on social outrage and Kim Kardashian. It has the inherent danger of turning the NY Times into Buzzfeed.
And just in case someone is going to claim that Buzzfeed has serious news: the two are incomparable. Buzzfeed News' frontpage right now is literally Kanye, Kim, and Trump. Ukraine? Too far away. Sunak? Who's that?
Idk, I can’t assume he is unwilling to subscribe just from his complaint. In any case, nytimes initial subscription costs like 5 bucks a month for a year. There are bigger things in the world for everyone to worry about. OTOH, If this is all about principle, he can read it at a local library, assuming he is in US. In any case, they come across as entitled more than anything
You can't call keeping merely the contacts without emails themselves "migration of email provider". It makes no sense.
Also, you said "follower[s] don't have to do anything", but somehow you (the followee) on the other hand needs to actively move? What if my follower is on this instance too and they don't actively move? Shouldn't their account disappear (and you lost your follower)? I genuinely don't understand how it would work other than everyone has to manually move together.
That's mistaking the map for the terrain. It's a networked system for leaving and retrieving messages. It's not a group of friends. The way you expect to migrate a messaging system is by moving the messages.
To confirm, I wish they would migrate posts, too, but I do not believe that the lack of that means that you cannot call it a migration.
However, your definition seems overly pedantic? It defines itself[0] as a social network with an emphasis on audience. Messaging is merely the method of interaction.
[Edit] "audience" is incorrect, I should've said "people"
A "social network" is a networked system for leaving and retrieving messages. Again, it is not a group of friends. It is a messaging system for a group of friends, just like a map is a graphical system for navigating a piece of terrain.
It seems as though you're putting emphasis on the wrong thing. Mastodon clearly believe the emphasis is on the _network_, as in, the people you follow and who follow you.
But I'm not entirely sure why you're arguing semantics with me. It can, by their definition, be considered migration.
> It seems as though you're putting emphasis on the wrong thing.
No, I'm just trying to be clear. If you can't move your messages in a messenger, you're not doing migration.
> It can, by their definition, be considered migration.
Their definition doesn't even require software. If they (and you) are trying to say that Mastodon is a group of friends, I'm going to beg to differ and say that it is a computer program that supports messaging.
edit: and why I'm going on an on about it? I'm clearly being persnickety, but because I think it's an important distinction, especially irt expectations that a user would have. The mystery for me is why you would insist that a messaging system that can't migrate messages has implemented migration.
You're not making a distinction, you're classifying it incorrectly. Containing a messaging component does not make it a messenger.
It's a social network, it clearly believes that the connections between people is the most important part of its offering. It can migrate a user and their connections.
Again, I would enjoy it if it did take posts, too, but clearly they disagree. I'm not going to say that they cannot claim it to be a migration as a result of that.
I'm not the person who said that but I can take a swing at it:
If the person does not migrate off of the instance, they'll lose the account and yes, you'll lose a follower. But if they do migrate, both of you keep the connection.
GNU are pretty hard libertarians. I think libertarianism has become a lot less fashionable during the 2010s, and many people I think started to see it as actively deranged over the last 5 years or so, with more moderate liberal ideas of free speech and responsibility to others around you being more mainstream now.
GNU are also very hard on principals. Again, I think society started leaning quite a bit more pragmatic over the past 10 years.
In the tech industry you can see this trend for example GCC to LLVM, LibreOffice to just using Google Docs, GPL to MIT, etc.
It requires you share the code with your users/the people you distributed derived works to for no additional cost. You can still charge money for the software, but you can't charge an additional fee for access to the code. You also give them the right to share it how they seem fit, so they could share it (the code, not necessarily trademarked things like names or artwork/assets) for free, share derived software including the code for a free or a fee, or not share any derived work at all.
Both "socialist" and "libertarian" have definitions that not just changes within a country, but basically every country has its own understanding of the terms (just like what people in the US would consider "far-left" is basically "center" politics in many places in Europe).
Labeling something "socialist" or "libertarian" in a diverse place like HN probably harms more than it does good, as everyone will read it differently and have different takeways.
To use entirely different terminology, I think people are just way more laissez-faire about software issues these days. Realistically, most software runs as a service now, and people are generally I think more happy to be more pragmatic rather than idealistic. I think GNU was generally aligned to the mainstream 'tech hacker' outlook in 2002, but it isn't in 2022.
The resistance to surveillance, the kind of 'prepping' mentality of running everything yourself, never using third-party services, and sticking with older working ideas over trying new things, those are much more libertarian than socialist, going off literal definitions of individual liberty over collective society.
If you write a list of philosophical ideas that are relevant to you that mentions libertarianism more than other philosophies, and you find that you have to explicitly say you don't endorse libertarianism, then that's a good indication that many people see you as a libertarian.
