Despite what the media leads you to think, there are still jobs that provide a living without contributing much to current social problems. You can do ok in medium tier cities with an average job, and still live in a safe neighborhood. If you pick a state with a good university system, the kids can get a good education without any debt. They won’t automatically get the connections of a top-tier school, but if you teach them the importance of connections early then they will do well (these schools often have strong alumni networks).
Continuing to work for evil people is a choice. Don’t brush it off.
No mention of Fossil, which works great and proves that the difficulty is in gathering dev interest.
It may be that the presence of Fossil as a mature option is enough to dissuade people from choosing/working on alternatives. I’m pleased to see git-bug slowly making progress though, maybe it will get there in time.
Fossil is very opinionated about some things, in particular, the inability to rewrite history, which makes it a non-option for some. So there's still a niche for Git-based distributed bug tracking.
Over 400 comments and it’s all flamewars and almost zero discussion of NixOS.
I think NixOS would be a great solution for this sort of environment. With something like impermanence enabled to make the systems immutable, you could push all configuration from a central server and ensure that there is no drift. You could even use read-only nix stores served over nfs. This would all be easier if your hardware is limited to a few select configurations, of course.
I am curious about your confidence for NFS for the nix store.
My thoughts, ignoring my technical disagreements, would be that you'd want to setup clients to have a specific set of software per their government role. A nix store could expose more software than you planned on supporting (e.g. forgotten software or licensed software).
You could use multiple shares and limit each configuration to the software required. In this case you would share common configs through modules on the build server. The build server would output updated configs to the proper share paths.
A monolithic configuration may be adequate if each machine role only exposes the software that’s needed in its config. Other software that’s in the store could be hidden in some way, like overlay paths, perhaps. There may be other methods too. There’s a similar discussion here although this is about restricting paths via bubblewrap: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/restricting-nix-store-in-a-mou...
Most licensed software wouldn’t be an issue as long as the user doesn’t have license access, I’m assuming the license server would grant or deny access based on the user/user role. Depends on the software I guess.
I wonder if it’s possible to run a bubblewrapped (or similarly restricted) Wayland client and restrict access to store paths that way?
Who is giving a standard office worker admin rights on their Windows machine in 2026?
From a user perspective, KDE Plasma or GNOME are simple environments to work in. Most stuff is on the web these days anyway; even a locked down kiosk setup would probably be adequate for many users.
No average office worker will be fiddling with Nix configs or installing Windows software. That’s for IT.
The difference is that without consistent enforcement, the rule becomes just a fig leaf for arbitrary decisions by the moderation team, who then receives an enormous amount of unintended power. Most reasonable people wouldn’t argue that the moderation team should be allowed to ban anyone that they have a personal disagreement with, for example. Yet here we are.
The problem is for the platform as a whole, not the individual who may or may not be punished.
Radicle is not based on crypto. The governance organization uses a DAO, but that’s not tied in with the project, only with the main dev team; it’s irrelevant to users. They had some early ideas to incentivize participation through crypto, but they abandoned it in alpha. I don’t know why this notion persists.
Personally I don't find the incentives of the only developer team working on something to be irrelevant to me as a user, if I'm looking for a long-term solution. Self-hosting/on-prem still seems like the only sensible solution here.
I think the notion persists because they are seemingly still using a DAO as the governance structure, so the organization sits on top of a cryptocurrency (is the idea of DAOs at least, in practice it isn't always so).
> Self-hosting/on-prem still seems like the only sensible solution here.
Radicle is self-hosted? Not sure what you mean by this.
If one doesn’t want anyone working on it to be crypto-adjacent, then I guess it wouldn’t be a good fit, but you can host and use it just fine without touching crypto yourself.
Why should a fallible, biased human “admin” be able to block an individual from communicating with another individual or group of individuals? This just creates weird social silos and echo chambers. It’s made worse because the people who choose to be jannies are often deeply broken people.
The Fediverse has the whole model backwards as a result of its design. Either individuals need to run their own instances, or identity needs to be completely ephemeral and flow through many servers as it does in Nostr. A Nostr admin can choose not to host data from a given identity, they could even use an identity whitelist, but users normally subscribe to multiple relays. In the end, the data gets through, while the relay admin can keep their own hands clean if they have a problem with the data.
Note that having this freedom does not preclude you from voluntarily signing up for blocklists. But this is an active choice, and it can’t be suddenly imposed on a set of users.
I have one with a spam filter that I control myself, not some BS like GMail who wants to decide for me. It’s well-tuned at this point and hasn’t given me problems.
If I want to, I can opt in to any number of spam blocklists. That’s kind of the point—it’s opt in.
It’s not directly causal, there is a feedback loop. The government has been failing to address the people’s needs for decades because the people failed to hold them to account. But the economy was decent enough for people to ignore this, except for occasional hiccups like 2008, which was papered over with QE and some crumbs for the masses (rebranded Romneycare under Obama).
Meanwhile educational standards have continued to decline, and this will inevitably affect both the electorate and their decisions. Education has been on a downhill trajectory ever since Roger Freeman convinced Reagan that free higher ed was creating a dangerous “educated proletariat.” This was the genesis of the privatization that created diploma mills, insane tuition costs, and the student loan crisis. Public schools gradually moved away from the humanities toward a narrow STEM focus, despite these fields not being a good fit for everyone. Coincidentally, a narrow STEM focus doesn’t give future voters a comprehensive and historically grounded understanding of government. (This has not been helped by left activists trying to overcorrect by rewriting history.)
Pressure has been building, and it found an outlet under Trump. Some steam has been released, Trump has 2 years left (maybe) and only die-hard supporters still believe in him. There will be a small window to either start fixing problems or set up a comprehensive police state to rule without public consent.
Continuing to work for evil people is a choice. Don’t brush it off.
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