Goodbye, and thanks for all the Bikesheds
49 points by alethkit
49 points by alethkit
It may not quite be a law of nature, but my personal guess is that the opportunities for anonymity on the Internet will shrink until mothers no longer are forced to have “the talk” when their daughters get their first mobile phone. As the parent of a daughter, I am totally on board with that.
This is going to kill people, mostly queer kids in households that want to suppress that queerness. (And if this post is on topic, so is that outcome.)
Yes, I find it upsetting that the author cites "women" and then the only source is what they think about their own daughter, who is not given a voice. A huge fraction of sexual violence against children is by family members.
No. It will kill all kinds of people. Queer kids is just the obvious tip of the iceberg.
Humanity as a species evolved in an environment where anonymity was the natural default. A lot of our survival mechanisms work only while not scrutinized closely. A lot of our well-being depends on our ability to virtue-signal and do our own thing regardless. We have never existed in a fully transparent environment, and everything we've built with a pretence of transparency had an escape hatch or a dozen.
Eventually we'll learn to survive in a transparent environment. Or to evade it. Or, for a change, we'll learn on our mistakes and put a hard stop on any attempt to make things more transparent than a 100 meters of water. But before that there'll be deaths, for all kinds of people, and very hard to predict.
Humanity as a species evolved in an environment where anonymity was the natural default.
Isn't the opposite true? True anonymity is a relatively modern invention - a product of large societies where it's no longer possible to know all the people you meet; of tools that make it possible to do things without physically being present; of cryptographic primitives that make your communications impossible to intercept.
For most of human history, anonymity has been something people have longed for but struggled to achieve in any meaningful way - something you can only do by moving to a completely different city, or country (and even then, by doing something like that you deamonymise yourself and essentially brand yourself).
Our survival mechanisms are predicated on anonymity not being possible. We are fundamentally social creatures, we live in communities, and use tactics like shame or shunning to keep order in those communities. These fundamentally rely on communities not being anonymous - you can't be shamed by someone who has no idea who you are, who can't track you or identify you.
I think what you're trying to say is that we didn't evolve in an environment where our every movement could be tracked, and that's true. In the trees, there's always the possibility to get away and spend a few hours alone, away from everyone else. (Note that this isn't anonymity - everyone knows that you're not around - but it is privacy, in that no-one knows exactly what you've done during that time.) In our modern society, we are increasingly giving up that ability. That is dangerous, I agree. But it's not anonymity.
Well, anonymity only makes sense as a concept in a wider society. It's difficult to maintain anonymity in a house in a circle of family.
But yes, I was actually thinking of privacy, not anonymity.
Just as a note: PHK has been holding and presenting such views for quite a while. Interestingly, in https://www.infoq.com/presentations/HTTP-Performance/ (2012), he argues against privacy as a global mandate out of that angle.
It will kill political discourse online really fast: https://courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/r-v-staatsanwaltschaft-saarbrcken-cjeu-judgment.pdf (EU court bans any propagation of news, broadcasts, etc that comes from Russia today, regardless of truth or validity).
The UK has 10k arrests for ppl who said the wrong in social media. Given that we know that the biggest most obscene and aggressive trolls on the Greek internet are manages by the government, its hard to see how this “age verification” and “chat control” will keep any kid safe.
But since ppl, supposedly knowledgeable, are so eager to give any kind of freedom they grew up with, for a little bit of (assumed) safety… Well, they deserve it.
EU court bans any propagation of news, broadcasts, etc that comes from Russia today
That sounds like a rational way to deal with a known malicious actor spreading disinformation. This is a restriction on licensed broadcasters, not on your freedom of speech as an individual. (Did you read the PDF that you linked to?)
"It shall be prohibited for operators to broadcast or to enable, facilitate or otherwise contribute to broadcast, any content by the legal persons, entities or bodies listed in Annex XV, including through transmission or distribution by any means such as cable, satellite, IP-TV, internet service providers, internet video- sharing platforms or applications, whether new or pre-installed."
The UK has 10k arrests for ppl who said the wrong in social media.
It seems that the number is actually about 12,000 people -- every year. This includes people threatening violence (reasonable), but also quite a few cases that are at best questionable. Examples: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/03/the-victims-of-britains-free-speech-crackdown/
Right now, there is a LOT of shrill propaganda from the tech bros, who call themselves “privacy advocates,” [...]
In comparison, tech sisters advocating for an absolute right to privacy seem to be a very rare, and maybe mythical, species.
we're right fucking here, actually.
... if you don't understand how protecting ourselves from having to reveal our identity on the internet helps us survive, you might actually be one of those tech bros.
The article, in my opinion, makes the idea about whether you think a requirement for de-anonymization on this internet pointlessly gendered. I think if you restate it in a more plain way ("people of this gender generally want this and people of this other gender generally want that") it would make some of the sentences there sound kind of ridiculous.
It's a good read, and does raise both interesting (and important) questions, and interesting insights. But the future is not set in stone, and we obviously have an important role to play in making the future safer for people (including children). But we also have a responsibility to help create a future in which liberty is still a human right, and human rights are still jealously and collectively protected by our society. The tension between these two goals exist, but it is a feature, not a bug.
Maintainer burnout is already a thing, and maintainer death will increase in frequency since FOSS looks more and more like it was a generational thing, like bell-bottom jeans and flower power.
Why? I don't understand where the author is coming from here.
The average and median age of maintainers is growing. Rapidly. The reasons are still nebulous, research in progress. But correlation that are hypothesis are simply...
Poverty and lack of time. FOSS is, by and large, and has been, a hobby. When you have more people in precarious positions and with less free time... You get less maintainers.
Note that this is a probalistic model. You still get FOSS maintainers, people in software still make more money than average. But over the whole distribution of people... It is still slightly worse than previous generation. And so... You get less maintainers, right when the need grows.
I could buy this, but do you have any citations backing up yours (/ the article's) claims?
Nope. As I said, these are hypothesis. I can try to search the stuff on the age of maintainers, should not be hard to find for you though.
The rest, as I said, is a model rn. I can back up the hobby part though. Search for "Tidelift reports", any year.
Don't make the usual mistake of the reader of these reports. Tidelift try to pay maintainers, so you should see overreporting of paid maintainer in their sample. Most people I see infer the opposite.
With the next sentence as additional context I read it as follows: existing maintainers will fail to find a suitable replacement so once they stop working on it (for one reason or another) we will see maintainer death.
On their own BDFL-led FOSS projects, maybe, but I see a lot of people of my generation creating and maintaining new free-and-open-source projects. And even with older projects -- the more community-based organizations seem to be flourishing. KDE has a bunch of young people involved, GNOME has a bunch of young people involved, quite a lot of those projects even apply for and get grants to fund young people to work on projects... I don't share the author's pessimistic view here.
KDE and GNOME are the largest projects in the Linux space next to the kernel itself meanwhile anything smaller, even if not any less important, is struggling. The whole xz kerfuffle was one example of that being abused.
This also goes beyond the software itself, distros for example are also having trouble attracting new people.
Any particular examples?
FWIW, Kamp has previously commented on the perils of bazaar/committee led governance, which might provide useful context: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257
My gut feeling is that there's a higher preference for "personal success" than "societal good" than we've had before. I'm aware that I'm generalising a lot here btw.
It's not surprising that this would carry over to the software development world, where a lot of people would rather work towards vibe-coding the next blockchain based prediction market app, to make big £££...rather than work on something like the (relatively ungrateful) job of maintaining FOSS software.
Like @cpurdy says though - the future is not set in stone. For every action there's a reaction, and I wouldn't be surprised if the current late stage capitalism in many countries made the pendulum swing back to a bit more of a caring worldview in the years to come. That's what I'm gonna try my hardest to make happen at least :)
Personally, I do not think that the people vibe-coding the next blockchain prediction market app are / ever would be the same people who work on maintaining free and open source software.
Personally
Fair enough. I think you're probably, at least mostly, right here. However I've seen people I know personally shift from actually maintaining FOSS software to being all aboard the AI hype train trying to exploit the fact that it's possible to make an easy buck by slapping an "AI" label onto something.
My experience is of course just anecdotal and should be taken with a big pinch of salt.
My concern is that if all that new developers are doing is asking Claude Code to generate software for them, then how would they ever be exposed to things like FOSS software development?
I grew up when OSI meant something completely different But I am not sure I agree. There is always a spectrum of personal good vs social good.
My sense is that we now have these hugely successful businesses that are happy to make profit directly from free software but don’t give back commensurately.
I don’t blame them, but I also don’t blame people who want to avoid being feedstock for these awful machines. More than anything else, I feel that FOSS is not dying, but being killed.
Yes, I was a passionate FOSS advocate. I stopped being one slowly, but what killed it for me was google's initiative to 'rewrite as much of androind as possible from GPL to Apache'. And I saw that they could paraphrase and plagerize their way to license change. The Android project really made me realize that FOSS isn't a public good, it's a pile of gold on the street waiting to be privatized.
EDIT: I still use linux and lineage and I am so greatful to those still freely maintaining this software for me to use 💚💚💚
I think this might be a case where the FOSS model is neither a complete success nor an absolute failure, but probably somewhere in between.
I'd wager I probably use 90%+ OSS software on my computers, so from a personal (and business) perspective I'm eternally grateful.
Then we have the "bad actor cases" like:
I think the fact that huge corporations can screw you over when needed is a problem in general, no matter what business you're in.
And, spoiler alert: I think we are at the beginning of the end for FOSS as we know it.
I hate that I share the same sentiment
Attempting to lure in apprentice maintainers to replace my generation of do-gooders is already a losing proposition, and it is not going to happen at all if the role of maintainer is pro bono, while the paint-on-the-sign-is-still-wet “FOSS stewards” and “FOSS manufacturers” rake in the dough from that very same software.
This is the wrong way to look at generational transitions. Faced with a big gap in values and norms of practice, its easier for following generations to replace projects entirely than try to fill an old man’s shoes.
I strongly feel that the current wave of factors are leading to the biggest change in FOSS since I first got into it around 20 years ago - LLMs, maintainers quitting, VC funding for open source projects (e.g Bun, Deno, uv), lack of funding for non-corporate projects, lack of source-reference by AI-generated code which been based on licenses which require it, etc.
I am hopeful for the EU CADA (and associated Open Source strategy), because I think it might balance out some of the long standing issues we've seen in open source communities.
Countries allowing (or requiring) foreign companies to request and handle user identification is directly harmful to digital sovereignty. Likewise, so many people worldwide are willing sharing all their thoughts with chatbots. All their problems, all their photos. If Social Media captured what an individual might share "in public", LLM-based chat interfaces capture things individuals wouldn't even say out loud. And to me, that's pretty scary. I've been leading the digital sovereignty work in the last couple of years in my day job, and I'm actually quite hopeful in where CADA will lead.