contrapunctus

On iOS, Go Map!! has a mode which shows quests like StreetComplete. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Go_Map!!

An iOS version of StreetComplete is also in progress. If anyone is a developer, go help them out! https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5530

OpenStreetMap data is "open data", licensed under a copyleft license. If a company were to acquire the project, it legally couldn't add restrictions to its use, nor use it in a proprietary dataset.

Also, OpenStreetMap is governed by the non-profit OpenStreetMap Foundation, which any active mapper can become a voting member of. Corporate buyout of a democratic body like the Foundation seems unlikely.

Lastly, major companies like Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, TomTom, Niantic etc already rely on this data. Most of them are corporate sponsors of the OSMF and help keep the servers running. 🙂 https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Corporate_Members

Jabber, a.k.a. XMPP. It's decentralized, featureful, standardized, and low on server resources.

Here's a user's guide I wrote.

https://contrapunctus.codeberg.page/the-quick-and-easy-guide-to-xmpp.html

Thanks for reading, and sharing your feedback.

Fossify File Manager (formerly Simple File Manager) has this functionality. I haven't tried it with networked drives, though.

The post already explains in painstaking detail why network effect requires us to adopt extreme measures (which you mischaracterize as "you're either with us or against us"). It's the nature of the conflict, and free software advocates must either recognize it, or continue to suffer the dominance of proprietary software.

The issues with Matrix are perhaps better explained by others, elsewhere.

As I wrote in the post, "meeting people where they are" is how we get free software organizations which use proprietary platforms for everything. This mentality must be avoided if we want to move away from proprietary platforms.

core * tenet

The issue is above all that bridging to Telegram (a proprietary, centralized service) basically amounts to normalizing and encouraging proprietary services. The poor UX of bridges is a secondary issue.

You're not the first person to seemingly have missed that I offered to bridge the XMPP room to the Matrix rroom, provided Telegram was de-bridged...I suppose it's not clear from my writing.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

Where did you get the idea that I'm against software which "costs money or is corporate controlled"? All my objections are to proprietary software (whether on the client side or the server).

(I am against corporate-controlled platforms, but I haven't mentioned that in the post at all...companies sooner or later mistreat users. I've linked to a number of examples at the end of the post.)

That said...perhaps you refer to my opposition to centralized platforms? Surely the anti-user characteristics of centralized platforms are well-known at this point?