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[–] 15 points 4 hours ago (4 children)

Yeah, it certainly doesn't. What happened yesterday could've been easily avoided if so many countries and businesses had made their own in-house systems rather than depending on Microsoft...

But the problem is that for a lot of businesses, it just doesn't make financial sense to set up their own decentralised systems when centralised systems already exist, offering services way cheaper than you could ever make for yourself - unless there is a specific need it can't fulfill, or you already have appropriate staff and equipment to facilitate/maintain it on the cheap.

And it doesn't help that the general population also lean towards centralisation, all coralling where their friends and family are. And beating that momentum is almost impossible - heck, I'm still stuck using centralised chatting services because convincing anyone who doesn't already want to move with you is like pulling teeth, and worst part is, it only takes one minor inconvenience to undo all that convincing.

Having said all that, the one group I won't excuse is the Government and Public Sector. There's no excuse for tax-payer funded services to not be operating on their own services and/or using other sovereign services, rather than continuing to pump money out if their economy and into the hands of US tech giants!

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  • [–] 2 points 1 hour ago*

    But the problem is that for a lot of businesses, it just doesn’t make financial sense to set up their own decentralised systems

    The exact opposite is true. For every company big enough to have any in-house IT capacities it's cheaper to do it yourself. There is a reason AWS and hundreds of similiar smaller comanies globally became a provider of computer services and server capacities: it developed as a side-gig from over-capacities in their own infrastructure. Infrastructure build because it made finacnial sense to set it up to themselves to save money and have actual control over their data and stuff.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

    Hopefully change becomes easier with FOSS options becoming more capable.

    • LibreOffice can handle most common document formats for business, I think the main thing they're missing is a MS Projects alternative.
    • NextCloud can handle cloud syncing.
    • There's plenty of email managers like Thunderbird, and there's already a wide variety of email providers and a large company can afford to manage email themselves.
    • Matrix and XMPP are developed enough that they can easily replace Teams and Slack

    And the best thing (for businesses) about all of these options are that there's no licensing costs. There's already some companies switching to FOSS tech stacks, and so long as they're successful the trend could spread. Even more so if Europe succeeds at breaking away from US tech companies, since their adoption would mean even more funding for FOSS development

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  • [–] 2 points 1 hour ago

    As much as I hate to say it, Matrix and Nextcloud are too janky for the general public. Nextcloud having to download and run multiple MBs of php code makes it feel so sluggish to use the WebUI, and Matrix...

    Well, I think Matrix couldve been good but Waiting for this message, You don't have access to this message, ⚠️ Unable to decrypt message , This room has been replaced , and its very confusing for people who are used to Slack/Discord style UIs where you only need an invite link to join every room and not just joining the space, where you have to join every room individually.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago

    And the best thing (for businesses) about all of these options are that there’s no licensing costs.

    But who would bribe the comany or department bosses to use their stuff in particular when there is no money to be made from licensing costs... 😉

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