• 3 Posts
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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2025

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  • Open Source has nothing to do whether data involved in the program/service is available, it refers to the source code. This source code is the recipe of the program, it is written in a programming language. When a project is open source people who make modifications to that code must publish the modifications with the same licence(generally speaking), thus ensuring a mutual knowledge exchange.

    As for the data in Lemmy, yes you can see who upvoted posts and comments but it is not available in the interface. There is a website called Lemvotes or something that does this. To be clear, a project can be open source and not expose data of their users, for example the Matrix protocol.





  • I don’t think there are studies showing direct comparisons(that I know of), but it is clear that commercial social media stands to profit from you the more you use the platform and open-source platforms usually stand to lose money from hosting the service. That incentive alone is big enough to demonstrate how more harmful they are.

    Replacing real social interactions with virtual ones is harmul regardless of the platform, so at least open source ones don’t profit from addictions and mental health issues(like casinos). Not to mention that commercial options make it hard for you to leave the platform, and not in a “lets make a maze so the user takes longer to get out” but in a “lets stand in the door for days blocking the users exit”.

    Also important to note that it is possible to make a commercial social media platform without such aggresive strategies (at cost of their profit), and a open social media platform with aggresive strategies. It just happens that proprietary software can lend its hand to abuse which is not posible in open source. So in practice none of these happen.

    So in general I would say that open source social media is completely free of intentional harm and commercial ones will not bother if their platform is harming people as long as it makes profits.


  • I use Librewolf almost always I try others just for comparison an fun, here are they:

    • Librewolf: I use it for its privacy defaults and because it comes with no bloat and no nonsense.

    • Konform Browser: A fork of Librewolf but based on Firefox ESR rather than the regular release and focusing in smaller settings improvements. I’ve talked to the developer and they are very nice and seem to fix issues rather quickly. By the looks of it I will be moving to this browser permantly.

    • Ungoogled Chromium: For testing webpages, like styles and stuff for my blog.

    • Glide Browser: Its basically the Vimium extension + BetterFox. It’s stil in early developement and it looks promising. I prefer Librewolf settings better than Betterfox so this keeps me from using this one.