Realistically, there’s going to be no way to stop this. It’s too useful. It works and most people appreciate it. I know this because I have visited southern China recently. I’ve seen the train stations and coffee shops where people now think nothing of leaving their belongings completely unattended. This level of surveillance effectively makes petty crime impossible. It’s widely seen as progress, in a way it is progress, and there’s no going back.

The challenge remaining is to keep some level of democratic accountability over our governments. That’s feasible but it’s not going to be easy.

This post breaks literally rules #1, #2 and #3 of this community. Crazy.

Mods please wake up and DO YOUR JOB.

Breaks rule #2 completely. Not a showerthought.

THIS IS NOT A SHOWERTHOUGHT. This just an opinion. There already a ton of places to put your banal talking points like this. Why can’t you put them there??

For examples of what a showerthought is, look on the right. Another one was posted 2 minutes after this very post:

“With all due respect” could imply that no respect is due and therefore none is given

That is a showerthought.

PS: Want more substance? It breaks rule #4 partially and rule #3 totally.

Indeed, confusing terminology. I consider that collaborative document editing is the activity, cloud hosting vs P2P is the technical implementation.

Like it or not, nobody much is doing the latter because it’s much harder to set up and the available cloud solutions provide a much (much) better user experience. I don’t say this a better situation but it’s the way things are.

Yes, in theory, although tricky to set up. What it cannot do, at least not without fiddly modules, and even then nowhere near as well as the cloud competition, is any kind of collaborative document editing. Which is where the world is at today.

Your initial response got peoples’ backs up because of its dismissive tone and (it seemed to me, as you hadn’t provided context) apparent advocacy for web-based tools like O365 or GSheets.

The pernicious side of social media in microcosm. To say “it’s not collaborative” is somehow understood as shilling for big tech. Always the worst possible interpretation of every remark.

Agreed as to vim.

Yes yes. The issue here being that in the real world nobody much is doing the latter. But we’re getting off topic, LibreOffice is neither.

Yes, true.

My single personal spreadsheet is (uh) a CSV that I edit with vim. I don’t want to have to fire up a monstrous GUI app just to view a table. But sure, count me as eccentric in this way.

Most of the spreadsheets I deal with are for work. For what I consider obvious reasons, they’ve been cloud-hosted for literally decades now.

Honest question: who would use a non-collaborative standalone spreadsheet in 2025? I don’t get it.

Very useful concrete example of how these changes might be a problem. Thanks.

And the second is going extinct.

Mice? What is this thing you talk of?

Exactly. I do it pretty regularly and I’ve been using Linux for 20 years.

And yet people here are still saying “no biggie”. It’s pure status quo bias.

Come on, having a 3-key combo for such a common task is a PITA. There’s a reason people have been complaining about this for decades.

Zero and I feel bad about it.

In (very partial) mitigation, I regularly contribute bug reports and other detailed feedback on lots of issue trackers.

Here’s the fundamental problem. I benefit from a whole bunch of FOSS projects. I absolutely cannot afford to donate 5 USD to each one per month. Even donating $1 to each would be unaffordable - and of course that makes no sense because of the fees problem. It’s the same problem with podcasts, and indeed basically all internet content.

We have to find a way to make non-DRM micropayments work better. It’s the only alternative to the poisonous ad-based information economy. I so want a solution like Flattr to become widely adopted. That is: I decide a cap on my monthly donation total, and then that sum is divided up among the projects I choose according to criteria I choose.

This is the correct but boring (but correct) answer.

Yet another not-a-showerthought.

In no way is this a “showerthought”. Seriously. This community is being devalued to worthlessness.