Emacsen
A bit of a technical rant here on the challenges of FLOSS. I may turn this into a longer form writing if people want.
* I need a "sign up for dates" newsletter
* Proprietary newsletter providers have have embedded trackers that make them less than ideal, but make it *very* easy to integrate, including all the tools to be GDPR compliant, work on static websites, etc.
* If I want to avoid using them, I need to now write my own web application
...
Emacsen
* There are FLOSS options, namely Mailtrain and Sendportal
* That now means running at least one more (possibly two more) services on my own
* Sendportal looks simpler, but it requires I write my own "widget" (not a huge deal but another service), and it doesn't have a docker image
* Mailtrain is more mature, but more complex to use
* If I'd chosen the proprietary option, I'd have been up and running days ago, but instead I'm spending time and a lot more money (to run services)
Emacsen
Running FLOSS and not using trackers is very important to me, but I can't imagine someone who isn't very technical being able to get through all this.
I think we in the FLOSS world need to give folks who make other choices slack, because it's also not necessarily that they realize that a newsletter provider is possibly going to embed trackers. They may see it as a benefit (not realizing) or may not even know or have access to those trackers at all.
One last thought on this...
Emacsen
When I've talked about these sorts of issues, both in the past and now, many responses are "Why don't you run ____" or some other piece of advise of that nature.
This advise is almost always a bad answer. Firstly they rarely correctly identify the problem I'm actually trying to solve. Secondly, and more importantly, they fail to acknowledge the difficulty of being asked to do this much labor for Freedom.
It's a toxic behavior from our community, and we need to call it out.
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