this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Ya, this is exactly the attitude that burns out devs and kills projects. Congrats for being super entitled towards a free project.
It is not entitled to expect a published project to comply with basic privacy legislation and not be illegal to use.
If your bar for this project is that much below basic consumer expectations, then this project was always going to fail.
No it's not. But what is entitlement is bombarding voluntary devs with garbage requests. Is this particular issue entitlement? No. But having seen the various requests made over the last year or so there's a breaking point where a person gets overly sensitive.
Think of being pestered ALL day at work over garbage and having an all around bad day. Then on the way home you jump into a store to pick something up and someone says something annoying but ultimately innocuous to you. Some people can handle it in stride, some people's nerves get frayed.
I'm not excusing the devs here. I don't actually know what their thoughts are. But from personal experience in the dev world and from what I've seen, it looks to me like they're getting frustrated by users.
And they might be in a region where the privacy concerns don't apply to them. And I agree that it's a problem, but ultimately it's their right and prerogative to not implement.
Remember, absolutely no one here has paid a single CENT to the devs for their work (not talking about donations).
So complaining about the quality of their work while you are benefiting from it for free is literally entitlement.
I understand having frayed nerves, I even understand snapping at someone because you're having a bad day, and I do feel sympathy for the devs, and wouldn't hold this against them (especially since they're at least providing a nuke everything option that will address it).
But the line between entitlement and reasonable expectation is not one of monetary compensation.
Engineering ethics does not let you off the hook just because no one paid you to build what you built. If an engineer goes to the park and unilaterally builds a playground that doesn't meet basic legislated safety standards and kills a kid, they're not off the hook. They will be investigated by their professional body and have their license revoked.
Hell if they just build a playground off in the woods on their own private land but don't take reasonable steps to prevent kids from accessing or using it then they will have their license revoked.
Sure, but if you want to extend the analogy that far, then the devs are just posting free plans online on how to build a playground. It's the instance owners who physically build the "playground" and are liable.
Again, that does not matter. If an engineer published those plans online and you built it and your kid died they would have their license revoked and face likely criminal liability.
There's no equivalent to a licensed civil engineer in programming.The proper analogy is just anyone putting up those plans.
Why do you keep adding new parameters to these analogies? It's such a simple concept but you are determined to prove your opinion, that the devs should acquiesce to your point of view, no matter what.
It's literally called a software engineer in most jurisdictions that aren't America where anyone is allowed to call themselves that. And software engineers also have to take engineering ethics, both courses in university as well as in their final professional exams if they want to call themselves engineers.
You're the one who added the "posted online" parameter. I responded and pointed out that it doesn't matter to the analogy.
If you put something dangerous into the world, mark it "ready to use", and encourage people to use it, and that results in them getting hurt or hurting others, then that is a bad thing and you have an obligation to fix it or warn people.
You're right about it being a simple concept, I don' understand where you think I'm demanding anyone do anything. The devs have already acquiesced after the community overwhelmingly dumped on their response. My only point has been that it's not entitled to expect a developer to put a warning on software once they've been alerted that it's dangerous.
Your failure to provide a reliable source for your claims is not my problem.
If you cannot provide a reliable source of your claims, your claim will be dismissed.
Is it entitlement if it's making using the entire thing illegal everywhere? Since there is no tooling to block traffic from the EU / not federate with instances that don't comply with GDPR?
No. It's the dev's project. They can do whatever they want with it. They can delete the repo and go live in the woods if they want.
To be clear, I don't agree with the stance they have taken. But I also see the kind of reactions there are far from what people are making it out to be. I think the people complaining about the devs being "mean" are just hypersensitive and have never been told "no" their whole lives.
Like I said, I disagree with the devs' position to not implement this feature. It's been highly requested, and for good reason. But this is a free project. If they say no, then it's no. If we don't like that decision, then maybe we need to move somewhere else.
It sucks but sometimes that's life.
I don't care if they are mean. The app isn't GDPR compliant. That's what matters.
Fine, that's what matters. Then ask them to implement it or write it yourself.
And if they say no, then that's your answer and Lemmy instances within the EU will need to move out of the EU or just shut down.
They can't be in the EU or the US. That cuts like 99% of them off. That's exactly my point - they don't want to implement something that makes the app illegal with 99% of the userbase being from there.
Ok, then it's time to jump to another platform
For an instance admin? Yeah, it probably would be a good time to not get screwed over. Or at least try to implement it themselves. Traffic blocking isn't that problematic when location based