Did you read the article? This is 100% the opposite of his point. He wants to, among other things, publicly fund development of open source, at the expense of private companies which are currently profiting from it in arguably-abusive fashion.
I wasn’t too psyched about reading this article, but I was surprised at how sensible it is – among a bunch of pretty good points he makes, this is one of them:
Another straw burdening the Open Source camel, Perens writes, “is that Open Source has completely failed to serve the common person. For the most part, if they use us at all they do so through a proprietary software company’s systems, like Apple iOS or Google Android, both of which use Open Source for infrastructure but the apps are mostly proprietary. The common person doesn’t know about Open Source, they don’t know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest. Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them.”
From the end user’s point of view, there is absolutely no open-source-ness to your Android phone. (BSD which iOS is based on was always designed to make this a possibility, but the GPL was not.) They’re using all this software which was supposed to be authored under this theory of GPL, but except for the thinnest thinnest veneer of theoretical source availability, it’s proprietary software at this point.
RMS actually talked about this. He laid out this vision of this bright future where you’d always have access to the source code for all the software on your computer and the rights to take a look at it or build on it or modify it, and some reporter said, well yes but what about all these other urgent problems that are ruining the world with private industry trying to make money at all costs and destroy it all. And RMS said, more or less: Yes. It bothers me a lot. But I don’t really know about that, and I know software, and I felt like in this one specific area I could write a bunch of software and solve this one problem in this one area where I felt like I could make a difference. If other people could get to to work on these other more urgent problems that’d be great, because they also bother me a lot.
Collard and colleagues first published their finger amputation thesis a few years ago but were criticised by other scientists, who argued that the amputation of fingers would have been catastrophic for the people involved. Men and women without fully functioning hands would be unable to cope with the harsh conditions that prevailed millennia ago.
Sounds pretty fair.
Since then, Collard, working with PhD student Brea McCauley, has gathered more data to back the amputation thesis. In a paper presented at the European Society conference, they said their latest research provided even more convincing evidence that the removal of digits to appease deities explains the hand images in the caves in France and Spain.
Oh really? Sorta interesting, okay, what’s the evidence?
The team looked elsewhere for evidence of finger amputation in other societies and found more than 100 instances where it had been practised. “This practice was clearly invented independently multiple times,” they state. “And it was engaged in by some recent hunter-gatherer societies, so it is entirely possible that the groups at Gargas and the other caves engaged in the practice.”
…
That is not convincing evidence.
Sure, it’s possible. If someone assembled some data that showed that in the modern day, ritual amputation is way more common quantitatively than accidental loss of digits, and showed that they were able to reject some other plausible explanations (e.g. showing that there wasn’t a particularly cold climate in that area that would cause frostbite to be more common than normal), then sure. But that’s not this paper, it sounds like.
Hm, yeah, I would just start up a Mastodon page in parallel with the Meta page. Pick the right “home” server to join; that’s critically important for Mastodon in a way that it’s not for Meta. Put in charge of the page someone who’s genuinely excited about participating in Mastodon, and would be engaged with the gaming community there whether or not they were in charge of the page. I don’t think I would recommend spending anything on ad promotion of the Mastodon page, but like I say I’m not convinced of the utility of spending money on Meta promotion either. YMMV
Anyway like I say my level of knowledge about it is pretty minimal but I’m happy to talk more in depth on details of my experience also if you like.
I have some small amount of experience with this, but based on the little I know, here’s what I can say. First question is what is your goal? To get customers, or to create a community? Below is general advice but it’s hard to say just talking about it in the abstract.
If you want a community, I would probably advise to just treat it as one more channel, have separate pages in Meta / X / Fediverse / Pinterest or whatever as separate communities, since in a lot of cases there won’t be overlap between them. I wouldn’t recommend abandoning your existing Meta or X pages to set up a Fediverse page instead, although making a contingency plan for the slow motion demise of Meta as a platform for the long term seems like a good idea.
If you want to drive sales, then for me Google Ads always worked better than buying advertising on Meta or X or etc anyway. Have you measured conversion numbers from Meta? They make it easy to spend money definitely, but I always found the ROI in terms of pure paid sales to be pretty bad from them.