@bkuhn so, something like "that's not true and you are a jerk for saying it" would be entirely reasonable.

@bkuhn and if you are the victim of that bad behaviour, I think the expectation is even lower.

@bkuhn if someone does something, believing they are in private, that they shouldn't do anyway, well, I think you have less expectation to be polite and inform them that they are accidentally exposing their own bad behaviour.

@bkuhn this is such an interesting question.

In situations where someone behaves as if they are in private but they're not, I think it's polite to let them know. So if someone walks into a room you're in and starts changing their clothes, you might say, "I'm here," or "Do you want this room to yourself?"

@cmconseils @maj

And if you want to tell me your number one, add a comment!

Friends, this is not intended to be an exhaustive list of everything you could feel loyalty to.

If your number 1 isn't on this list, pick the thing that's on this list that's highest ranked, even if it's number 3,450,179.

@funcrunch I'm glad you have a place you feel safe. You deserve that.

@VTDARKSIM ha! What are you studying?

@philip a lucky break!

@bakachu there's a million other things you could have loyalty to. This poll is about which of these four you have the most loyalty to.

@Quasit there's a million other things you could have loyalty to. This poll is about which of these four you have the most loyalty to.

To which of these affiliations do you have the most loyalty?

#EvanPoll #poll

@openrisk Signal is a good example. They've mostly managed to pivot from the big one-time donation from the WhatsApp founder and licensing deals with Big Tech for the Signal protocol trademark to user donations, which now make up the majority of their income. Not enough to cover costs, but a good place to be. I think one question is when they diversify what they offer.

Anyway, I'm going to choose to stay hopeful. I think most of the options for these two big organizations are revolutionary and not evolutionary. But I believe they still exist. I'm going to say Neither, but ask me again next year.

What could Mozilla do? Build cloud services attached to your Firefox account -- like Google and Apple have. Use their reputation for openness and privacy to attract a generation of users who are despondent over Big Tech.

What could Wikimedia do? Use public pressure and shame to rewrite those re-use deals. And also disintermediate -- get directly connected to users, with chatbots, search, and voice assistants of their own.

Or maybe even wilder things. I don't know everything; I'm just some guy.

And I guess that's surfacing something important about both cases -- and a chance to overextend my metaphor. Pulling out of a death spiral in a video game requires a lot of knowledge of the game, and a certain willingness to take risks. You have to sometimes send an expeditionary force through the mountains to find a uranium mining site. Or you put all your barley resources into building a war blimp. If you don't know these long-shot options are possible, you won't try them, and you'll fail.

I don't know, honestly.

My harsh assessment is that Mozilla has developed a culture of quitters -- they kill products long before they've had a chance to thrive.

Wikimedia, on the other hand, is an intrinsically conservative ecosystem. I don't know if it has the culture to try new things. They may try cutting their way to success, too, like with the shutdown of Wikinews.

https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_closes_Wikinews_after_21_years

So, here's the hard part of the poll question: *inevitable* decline. Have these two major projects reached a point where their optionality has run out, and they're going to just keep shrinking, failing to support other projects in the ecosystem, living with less and less? Losing the manganese mine, losing the barley fields, trying to stretch the last of the soup next to a cold fire as the orcs beat down the last walls of the university?

I'm not sure either of those policies is going to matter in the long run.