• 0 Posts
  • 162 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 21st, 2024

help-circle







  • It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different.” Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy.” And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.

    That’s the gist. Then he goes on with another paragraph of whataboutism but of course not a single mention of the tens of millions of dead both, Stalin and Mao, were responsible for.

    Of course he’s also an western armchair socialist. People that actually lived in the Sowjet Union (and not in today’s Russia) draw quite a different picture.












  • Why isn’t it on F-droid if it’s FOSS?

    That got me interested and apparently, they fear forks running out of date.

    Concerning F-Droid, we already providing an auto-updating APK directly from our site, and we really don’t want forked versions of the app maintained by other parties connecting to our servers. Not only could the users using the forked version have a subpar experience, but the people they’re talking to (using official clients) could also have a subpar experience (for example, an official client could try to send a new kind of message that the fork, having fallen out of date, doesn’t support). I know you say you’d advocate for a build expiry, but you know how things go. Of course you have our full support if you’d like to fork Signal, name it something else, and use your own servers.

    While that statement got plenty of thumbs down, I hate to admit that F-Droid is indeed out of date quite often. I currently can’t find a source for this but I once read this has something to do with their signing process.