I am aware of the difference in philosophy taken by both Gnome and KDE, but would you mind elaborating on the ‘assholes’ bit?

It’s like the other comments are living in a parallel universe.

What part of the article did they actually read? Isn’t the Slack/Electron resource utilisation screenshot enough to prove an important point?

No, Electron-based applications are not better than “they used to be.”

We all fucking know why Electron got all of these companies interested in making applications with it: cheap, probably imported labour to build applications. That’s it. And no, it is not better “DX” either. NPM and the NodeJS ecosystem in general are toxic and unsustainable for larger applications.

Your public domain assumption doesn’t have to apply to others, legally or ideologically.

Data ownership does exist in the Fediverse, in fact it is one of its selling points that you can set up your server and own the data instead of using a surveillance capitalist SaaS that stores, manipulates and imposes legal rights over your data. Applications like Mastodon do send a federation request to other instances to delete data if submitters want to. Additionally, some users put licenses on their profile that might have restrictions (i.e: CC non-commerical, etc.) on what you are legally allowed to do with the data.

So no, accessing the data is not the same as using or processing it for many people, legally too in several parts of the world. Also, “innocuous curiosities” label is entirely subjective.