As I, as usual, watch tech startups immediately, reflexively outsourcing biz-critical capabilities to Github, Trello, Slack, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Salesforce, et al., I'm struck by the fact that, in 2 years time, almost all of them will, without a shred of irony, be bemoaning the lack of support for small, plucky local NZ companies like theirs by NZ gov't and other NZ businesses...
@lightweight People use these as everyone else uses them there needs to be a way to break thet deadlock and move away,k but it needs the skills to set up alternatives. perhaps..
@zleap Perhaps running a startup requires more skill (or at least better researching capabilities and less trust of marketing) than these people possess...
@lightweight Iam undertaking a basic IT course, sopart of that is to demonstrate you can set up accounts, search for info and post messages to social media for example. The whole course isvery big tech centered so they assume you are going to set up say gmall or use bing , google for search, or use facebook etc for social media. I am breaking that. When I set up mastodon i created screen shots so am using those to show I can set things up, But there is a almost subliminal messaging to promote the big tech companies, so local training company run courses in using Word, so that idea is put in peoples heads, the promotion of alternatives is non existent.
Even though I run the tech jam I feel there is an uphill battle to argue in favour of free software, it is see as niche (i think that is what I was told ) or only used by a select few, I know some of the yoing people are looking for alternatives to google, so when we get back I will suggest things like disroot, or cryptpad (alt to google docs) collegues at the tech jam seem to find some odd article saying thing these can't be trusted and then deny google sell data they need to protect their reputation. We just need to get the word out that there are alternatives and people use them.
The fans of FB ,l MS , Google have answer for everything. I did set up an account for the tech jam on friendica, but it needs people to be active to prove to people that these platforms are used,
@zleap the only thing that the FOSS world doesn't have that the proprietary world does... is everyone's money, to spend on marketing.
@lightweight I will share this, i am familiar with some of these tools, Experimented with big blue button yesterday very impressive, have you seen cryptpad ( https://cryptpad.fr/ ) alternative to google docs.
@lightweight could you fix the CSS for Netsurf? it's a bit hard to read
@grainloom what's Netsurf? I can look at some other way of rendering tables... but not sure how it would work.
@lightweight it's a lightweight browser.
most JS-less websites work properly in it, so i suspect there is something weird going on with the HTML structure on yours.
@zleap in my organisation, we've avoided almost all proprietary software for years (recently we replaced Zoom, the last proprietary holdout) - our stack: https://tech.oeru.org/working-home - and I'm also making #FOSS resources available here in NZ right now: https://nzoss.nz/workfromhome...