I found it to be a very interesting blog and something I hadn’t thought much of before. So I started to make a spreadsheet going through which projects I use and whether they use platforms like Mastodon; Lemmy; PixelFed; Codeberg; Matrix; etc and it was a sombre experience as I realized most that I use have next to zero presence on the fediverse. I didn’t mind if they had no social media presence at all, like say Trisquel, but was a little annoyed at how many had several social media accounts, none of which were FOSS. I have thought about ditching programs or projects for ones that support FOSS platforms, I guess it would depend on what options I was left with.

In a more immediately pragmatic sense, I think it’s also important to, at least, support/bridge to FOSS infrastructure (for example SuperTuxKart, despite having most of the community on Discord, partially bridges to Matrix and IRC). Many people, including a lot of technical people like developers, are attracted to FOSS projects because they don’t want to use non-FOSS (maybe for privacy reasons, or boycotting companies like Microsoft, or a general distrust of commercial software in our current environment).

So why would I want to join a non-FOSS service to contribute to a FOSS program, if the primary reason for using it at all is that it is FOSS?

Being forced to join a commercial tool to contribute has demotivated me from contributing to some projects, so this isn’t a hypothetical concern.

I think lots of open source software is created for exposure, to make more connections, get more contributions, probably job offers before burnout sets in. Unless someone is really principled about FOSS and has enough funding, they’ll not go out of the way to make themselves harder to be found.

The FSF uses nonfree social media sometimes to get new people into free software: https://www.fsf.org/twitter Of course, many free software projects likely don’t use social media for that purpose.