For all we know…

This isn’t something we need to speculate about. The vulnerability histories of popular closed and open source tools are both part of public data sets.

Looking into that data, the thing that stands out is that certain proprietary software vendors have terrible security track records, and open source tools from very small teams may be a mixed bag.

Oh, that’s cool! And yeah, sounds kind of cursed, too.

An RSS file is a plain text, computer readable file that you add to your website, containing a list of all recent posts that you want to promote.

Anytime I add a post to my blog, I update my RSS file. (Well, a piece of automation does, I could hand edit it, but I’m lla lazy programmer.) Then a service I registered with shares any new posts (posts with today’s date) to services line Mastodon or Lemmy through bot accounts that I set up.

People can also subscribe directly to the RSS feed (file), using various news reading apps. (But I think following RSS through Mastodon and Lemmy bots is becoming more popular, lately?)

You can learn a lot more about the RSS through the RSS Specification, but you may not need to.

I find that WordPress and other blog solutions mostly just make good default assumptions whenever I have turned on the RSS feature or plugin.

Yes.

First, yes, WordPress can be federated with a plugin.

If you’re looking for the easiest, most developed, option, it’s usually WordPress.

Alternately, there are many ways to join anything that produces RSS to the Fediverse.

(And of course WordPress also supports RSS)

(And lots of other hosted options support RSS!)

Static site generators like Jekyl and 11ty are particularly well suited to building a website to share comics.

Both can also produce an RSS feed, with the correct plugin.

Are you saying we Americans do things in objectively worse ways, just to remind everyone what we have the freedom to be confidently wrong?

Because I can confidently tell you there’s no examples of us doing that. (This is sarcasm, intended to amuse you.)

Idk that Chromebooks count as being super locked down when most of them can run Linux apps.

I mean…sort of? I used some advanced computer knowledge last time I ran anything interesting on a Chromebook. I was manually installing basic missing shell utilities, just to get other stuff to run. (Edit: sounds like it’s much better today, than last time I tried!)

Maybe they have opened ChromeOS up more, since?

But you make a good point. ChromeOs is more intentionally minimalist than intentionally locked down. The OS didn’t actively fight my adding things, there just wasn’t much there to work with.

ring ring: This is your upcoming Steam Deck purchase calling from the near future.

:)

Over on programmer.dev, we’re allowed to use AI, as long as we occasionally complain about how bad it still is.

It counts.

“It’s an older Star Trek meme, but it checks out.”

• Admiral Adama

“Three.”

Flash and Silverlight follow what I said. They were ubiquitous until the costs, being a bloated platform that couldn’t be ported to smartphones, caused the industry to shift to an open model.

I feel like we’re trying to find something to disagree about now…?

And messaging is a very old use of the Internet. IRC was created in 1988; Discord shouldn’t be a thing based on what you’ve said.

Discord does substantially more than IRC can do.

It’s wild to me that “people eventually move to the free thing, once it is feature complete” is a controversial take.

Yes, it can take multiple lifetimes. Yes, there’s plenty of examples where the closed thing persists long after an informed public would have switched.

But the shift to an open public standard eventually happens.

Nobody keeps a monopoly forever.

Monopolies based on restrictive agreements and secret code are unnatural, and they require constant upkeep. They eventually succumb.

In some cases, the standard even persists, but as an open one. Microsoft has figured this out, and now strategically open sources things they know they cannot keep alive, otherwise.

You’ve picked relatively new things. And I cannot predict the future. You might be right. Those could be lost causes. Experience tells me they are not.

I feel an obligation to point out the past to the younger folks who think “Microsoft and Adobe always win”. I feel this obligation,l because I was one of them.

Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silver light were inevitable. They were further closing down of existing dominant closed solutions. Now both are forgotten, replaced by open standards.

Microsoft now pretends they always intended to play nice. Adobe now pretends they never even tried to build a walled garden around the Internet.

We can perhaps agree at least that closed standards do frequently win, for awhile. No disagreement from me, on that point.

We might also agree that closed standards only fail when corporations get too greedy?

But of course, I’ll share my faith: corporations always, eventually, get too greedy.

I mean, I can help you can pick things that haven’t won yet all day. Gimp is free, Adobe works hard making a more compelling expensive product.

Adobe will someday stop innovating. Gimp will not. Gimp’s source code is the more resilient, thanks to it’s license. We (old people) have seen this play out many times.

Unix, BSD, and a dozen variants used to be the compelling options. Today, using Unix variants outside of Linux is vanishingly rare. Closed source browsers are rare today, and even those are built on the open source browser cores. Everyone is trying to enshitify Android, not iOS, because it’s the resilient licensed software.

It takes time. Everyone who can make a dollar fighting it, does so. But open standards win.

We already saw closed computers - Chromebooks. They’re still around, but they didn’t really catch on.

We are seeing more open phones, over time.

But to answer your question about Microsoft, specifically, oh yes. (I expect/fear that) Hardware produced specifically for Windows is going to get locked down much harder, soon. How else will they continue to ship spyware into people’s homes?

(I believe that) People who want privacy are going to need to choose their PC hardware much more carefully, in the near future.

Yes. Open standards always win, given time. No one keeps paying for a closed standard, once the open (free!) one is just as good.

Corporations are always trying to create walled gardens, and always eventually fail, (even if they succeed for decades). They must put something extremely compelling into their walled garden to attract customers. Eventually the novelty wears out, or maintaining their garden walls stops being profitable.

I would participate, but with my face blurred.

Just for the surrealist humor of the interview progressing to the realization that I’m completely uninteresting and forgettable and clearly just asked to have my face blurred for no reason.

You can assured that I’m not a bot because I would never sell out. I prefer keeping it real with Pepsi brand cola and Doritos brand chips.

(Shamelessly lifted from Wayne’s World II)

Which is why to this day, I have not watched a single Terminator film after T2.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but you might be interested in knowing that some of us feel that Terminator: Dark Fate avoids the issues you mention, and works as a direct and worthy sequel to T2.

I am on Lemmy and I hate communism (historical reasons) so maybe Doom is the true God.

IDDQD