Free Listening Manifesto

[mixmix]

It's great that people feel passionate about Open Source + FLOSS, I do to. I've also seen people things in response to this experiment which are pretty disrespectful. I could be wrong, but ironically, I (and others working in open source) don't have time to engage more deeply to resolve what appears to be bad communication.

I'm keen to block people if they're being rude, or wrecking conversations.

If you're worried about free speech, be at ease friend - I'm a big fan of free speech. I'm also a fan of free listening - this doesn't need to be the space where I listen to what everyone has to say. You're most welcome to start your own projects and explore in parallel to this.

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Free Listening Manifesto

What is free speech? Looking at the history of this term, I think free speech is really about printing presses. It means that the government is not allowed to throw you in jail (or burn you at the stake) because they do not like what you are saying.

But free speech does not mean that anyone is obliged to read your pamphlets! You still have to publish things that other people want to read, if you want people to read it. If people get upset about what you have to say, and express that loudly, that is not censorship - that is actually more free speech.

If other people getting upset affects you, congratulations! you have empathy!

If an individual chooses to ignore you, or advise others to ignore you, that is also their freedom. This becomes censorship when someone in a position of power uses a technical means to make decision for others - for example, by throwing your into prison or kicking you off a centralized service.

Although, that act may well represent the will of the other users of that service - This may be fairly evident when someone is kicked off, say, a forum with a small community.
This is harder to establish on large centralized platforms such as twitter - but anyway, judging from the amount of harassment on those platforms, they are not effective at censorship anyway. The inept censorship they do manage only seems to amplify the voices of those they feel obliged take a stand against… (because a high profile banning becomes a viral news piece)

I think we need a new concept: Free Listening.

Free Listening is the missing right of the internet age. There is so much information that choosing what not to read becomes a major challenge. Getting access to the material you want to read is already achived, but we lack power to filter what we don’t want. This right is based on individual freedom and thus does not conflict with free speech. I think this freedom will be empowered by sharing information for the filter - things the the ability to subscribe to other’s moderations.

This is power given not power taken, free listening via free speech.

Reproduced from #scuttlebutt : %V2rZOt+nuTrS/89OquyPSgBBRjkJAf81Stq/sg2Fmtk=.sha256

[Nirusu]

Okay, so you say your whole idea was to set up a conversation. People gave you feedback, both positive and negative, and now you want to declare a manifesto which basically says to filter other opinions and moderate them?

If you're not open to the opinions of other users, why bother opening a discussion? Either pull through and stop giving a shit (it's FOSS after all, the dev can do what they like with their project) or respect opinions from both sides (highlighting the 'open' in open source).

But right now, you're just trying to open a biased conversation to confirm your ideas. Why?

[mixmix]

My bias is towards conversation which is constructive @Nirusu . If people go way off topic, or are just hurling abuse, I can choose to not listen to that. <3

[Nirusu]

Of course you can! But this manifesto basically says "If I don't agree with you, I can delete it for every one else".

Now, with aggressive or off-topic comments, this is understandable, but you don't need a manifesto for this, just the standard GitHub rules.

[toloveru]

Free listening (do you also wear ear plugs?) will probably make this comment meaningless and removed, but anyway...

I think that open source developers should be paid for their work somehow, and most large projects' developers are actually hired by companies like Intel, AMD, Nvidia not so much I guess.. you get the idea. Other projects like the ones from Red Hat and Canonical are directly paid by their respective companies. And Red Hat is a subsidiary of IBM (subsidiary? They've been acquired a while back anyway) so there's that.

Additionally, I'm writing an enterprise distribution and would also like to be paid for my work by such enterprise customers. So what I'm selling is support such as network design and things like that. A developer of the project to have on call. I don't know how much of this applies (or can apply) to your project or NPM in general, I don't use any of it for a variety of reasons. But it's how I'm doing it, and to adhere to the open source nature of sharing information, perhaps you could use it.

Perhaps you might also want to look into how Proxmox and iRedMail work in this regard, they work in not too dissimilar ways. Needless to say, that does not include ads.

[feross]

I appreciate the thoughtful discussion and feedback. I ended the experiment last week. I shared some thoughts about how the experiment went from my perspective on my blog: https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/