Hello friends

Hello friends.

Let's talk about tech in a different way. Let's talk about life needs and necessities. I've come upon a hurtful conundrum.

On one side, I use social media (Facebook, Slack, Discord, Google services) for business. That's how I make my living. My entire income is based on being able to connect with people, give them a brain-dead simple way to talk to me, and give me money.

My income is heavily dependent on being able to reach the masses. I don't have an alternative currently. I'm also not willing to let go of my income as it is, nor opportunities social media lend me.

I'm stuck in a position where I am stuck in the proprietary ecosystem, and I want out. But that's not viable.

So the question becomes, how do I minimize the harmful effects?

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Other urls found in this thread:

postfix.org/DSN_README.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

the only way is to cut the cord, user
or, you know, just run an email server and use that to communicate like a sane man

How do I set up email tracking so I can see when people open my emails on my own server?

postfix.org/DSN_README.html

also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon

Thank you. I'll be looking into these.

Also been looking at Facebook CLI options to keep up with the business network, however it appears that Zucc has been consistently giving developers a bad time about creating independent ways of accessing the service.

Twitter's dead to me, but then there's the big boys: LinkedIn and Google. Both of which are really difficult to avoid, particularly since I'd be out of place to try and change their workflow.

if you really want to leave proprietaryland your best bet is to drop all of them entirely
freedom is hard, when you want to do something specific to your needs you will generally have to do some things yourself
write some tools, customize and recompile a lot of things, etc
if you keep a foot in the door of proprietaryland, most people (probably you as well) are prone to simply saying "well, i can just step inside for a bit to get this done really quick" the moment things get difficult
at that point you might as well stay indoors at proprietary land, out in the free outdoors sometimes it rains

It'd be so much easier if I worked in tech. I'm in sales and marketing. There's really no good alternatives out there. All the networks I've seen have been really impressive tech-wise... but with no userbase -- the only thing that truly matters as far as my money's concerned.

in your case you might be stuck if you arent willing to change your business model
in marketing at the end of the day you will always be bound by the needs and expectations of the lowest common denominator among people

at that point i would say your best solution is to completely and totally separate your work and personal life
keep all of your proprietary shit on one work device
all of your social media, all of your work software, everything at all related to work on a single machine, and when you arent working simply turn the device off and walk away
keep it in its own room away from everything else if you can

i would definitely work on becoming more independent from your career
learn other skills, learn a trade that you can do independently, just anything you can use as a fallback
as you have probably noticed, proprietary shit has a way of locking you in totally
if your livelihood is dependent on it, you wont leave
you cant

thats why you should always have an independent fallback
that way you can, if you must
freedom goes beyond software

Be able to separate business from personal life

Makes a lot of sense, thank you. I've been seriously considering doing just that, however it's not easy -- particularly since a lot of what I do is reliant on building friendships and close connections with leads, which can take months for a good deal of them.

I'll see how I can plan this out properly.

If I were you, I'd try to advocate and encourage free alternatives, such as Mastodon.

How does one monetize those free alternatives?

It basically goes back to influencer marketing, which, let's be frank, isn't very effective compared to PPC.

by making them known to the market. It's not popular because no one uses it. Linux became so good because everyone started to use it and contribute.

Difference is, Linux started being popular in a time where competition was scarce. At this point, everyone's not only competing with Facebook and Twitter; they're also competing among themselves for who attracts more users.

If you say shit is tasty everyday on every site,news channel, newspaper and billboard someone somewhere will try to eat shit and many someone somewhere will like it, eventually.
Nirvana is a good example of this, everyday on mtv.

>implying you weren't stuck in a proprietary ecosystem before

Ever heard of Intel?

Back in the day you had Windows monopoly that came pre installed. Years before you had IBM stuff and Windows had to make it through too.

I thought your income was based on being able to reach people, talk to them and receiving money from them, not monetizing the platform itself.

I've long since switched to AMD, although even that's not truly enough.

Absolutely. Difference is, how many people actually use Linux casually? Manjaro is the only distro I would actually recommend people, because it's basically install-and-go.

Ease of use is a major selling point.

Yeah. And the best way to reach people is to go where they are, get to know them, build relationships, and offer to solve their problems.

At the same time, some of my clients run SaaS solutions, or membership platforms; PPC funnels are a great asset when it comes time to scale.

>And the best way to reach people is to go where they are, get to know them, build relationships, and offer to solve their problems.
Of course. What I'm saying is simply that you should encourage people to start using free platforms. Obviously, switching everyone over from Facebook isn't going to be easy or instantaneous, but it's not gonna happen if noone even tries.

That's true. Is there perhaps some sort of group or community that aims at a widespread Facebook exodus?

I'd be very interested in getting a think-tank together and pushing in that direction.

I don't even use social media, so I wouldn't know. I think it goes without saying that people who are already on Mastodon would generally share an interest in Facebook exodus.

Yeah, but they're not ON Facebook to influence and help people leave Facebook behind.

Absolutely. Difference is, how many people actually use Linux casually? Manjaro is the only distro I would actually recommend people, because it's basically install-and-go.
Ease of use is a major selling point.

You sure are not talking seriously. There are laptops that come with ubuntu/Pop! (ubuntu derivative) preinstalled. Most distros come usable OOB.

But we are not talking about OSes this is about soMed platforms, if you start using and promoting those free alternatives and you have a good customer base then they'll follow along. Only difference between one and another is that the private one will have analyst survey what features are needed and often impose those they want you to use, with FOSS you can submit ideas/features and make people help you to develop it.

No one cared who Facebook was until it had all your personal information sold

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>You sure are not talking seriously. There are laptops that come with ubuntu/Pop! (ubuntu derivative) preinstalled. Most distros come usable OOB.

I have never used a laptop aside from a Chromebook that my wife has. Perhaps it's different there. As far as hardware, I've had a ton of issues with hardware support (particularly nVidia GPUs). Manjaro is the only distro I didn't have to fuck around in to get my fstab and nvidia drivers working properly.

>if you start using and promoting those free alternatives and you have a good customer base then they'll follow along.

Convince me to convince my customers to convince their customers to switch platforms, when that proposition goes against their SaaS integrations, their customer base's convenience, and is overall just... difficult in so many ways.

>I have never used a laptop aside from a Chromebook that my wife has. Perhaps it's different there. As far as hardware, I've had a ton of issues with hardware support (particularly nVidia GPUs). Manjaro is the only distro I didn't have to fuck around in to get my fstab and nvidia drivers working properly.

Dell ships one of their flagship laptops with Ubuntu, System76 another laptop maker does it with Pop!, nVidia is/used to be a problem but nothing that can't be solved by downloading drivers Ubuntu, for instance checks automatically and offers you to download them.

>Convince me to convince my customers to convince their customers to switch platforms, when that proposition goes against their SaaS integrations, their customer base's convenience, and is overall just... difficult in so many ways.

Of course it's difficult, that's the beauty of being a sales man, make a speech and go sell Bibles in a rescue shelter from Church abused kids.
It's a tough gig and current customers may not like it but newers will if you have the option available.

>Ubuntu, for instance checks automatically and offers you to download them.

My last foray into Debian territory ended with me installing drivers, and then having to fuck with config files for half a day.

Ubuntu might be better, but I've settled on Manjaro.

>It's a tough gig and current customers may not like it but newers will if you have the option available.

That actually makes a lot of sense. I think it might be a good idea to start pushing on those free platforms, and see what gives.

There's people there for sure, but the question is... what platform is best?

For the normies, duh, Facebook, and you're good to go.

But for libre communities? Should I go with Gab, Mastodon, Diaspora, Plethora, Steem?

A lot of what I see on these platforms is idle politicking, rather than anything useful.

This is now an extinction lvl event thread due to OP's picture.
We're all doomed, unless we start having self sustained space ports, stations, and lunar/mars bases.

I think Elon Musk has the right idea about humanity needing to be space faring, fuck the brainlets who think we should give money to fucking niggers instead.

I did, that's why I never used it to begin with.

>Should I go with Gab, Mastodon, Diaspora, Plethora, Steem?
I'm not extremely knowledgeable about the others, but Mastodon seems to be the one with most momentum, and most importantly it's entirely decentralized.
As for replacing Discord, you may want to look into Matrix, which is also decentralized, and has a publicly available web app at .

>Mastodon
To expand further on that, Mastodon uses the ActivityPub federation protocol, which has been published and endorsed by the W3C, so it seems to me to be the best bet.

>My last foray into Debian territory ended with me installing drivers, and then having to fuck with config files for half a day. Ubuntu might be better, but I've settled on Manjaro.

It's more user friendly oriented, never tried Manjaro but has a nice UI and that adds points to the following crowd.

>That actually makes a lot of sense. I think it might be a good idea to start pushing on those free platforms, and see what gives.
Promote them, everyone has a hole to fill.

>There's people there for sure, but the question is... what platform is best? For the normies, duh, Facebook, and you're good to go.
The one you make the client believe is what he needs. Ofc you will need to have a good understanding of his needs and how the network actually works, that's why they come to you, right? because you know best.

>But for libre communities? Should I go with Gab, Mastodon, Diaspora, Plethora, Steem? A lot of what I see on these platforms is idle politicking, rather than anything useful.

That's because they can't talk politics on the average media network. It's useful if you have a use for it. You can't say Long Live Trump in facebook without having a hoard of orcs raiding your wallpost or whatever fb calls the users profile.

>how do I minimize the harmful effects?
Obviously everything that's work related shouldn't be impacted by your free software philosophy, getting shit done is everyone's number one priority. Where you can minimize the harmfil effects is in ypur personal life: Use mumble rather than discord/teamspeak, Use firefox/chromium rather than chrome or edge, use linux rather than windows (once again if you need win32 shit for your professional needs, obviously stick to windows).