There's that, but I'm not an SV person and my reaction was still "well, duh!".
An app like Beeper Mini wants to be something like NewPipe for YouTube: installable only if you know how to download F-Droid, maintained by a community of fans, used only by people who understand that Google can break it at any time and it might take days to weeks for it to recover.
What Beeper did instead was build a startup and sell subscriptions to mainstream users, and now that it inevitably broke they come off as very whiny about it. It's not just Silicon Valley business types who see that and wince: it's offensive to old-school hackers too.
Know how to download F-droid? As in, "Google F-droid, click link to f-droid.org, click 'Download F-droid'"?
I guess I can only speak for myself, but I'm pretty alright with people building apps with the expectation that would-be users will need to know how to install apps.
I didn't say it was a high bar, but it's enough of a barrier to drive off most of the entitled complaints when Google periodically breaks the app.
Re:Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
by Nullabillity on Friday December 08, 2023 @10:11PM
(#38578148)
Everyone deserves a path around vendor bullshit, not just "true hackers".
Please, no. I do not want to have to clean malware off my inlaws phones in addition to their fucked up computers.
Re:Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
by anticensor on Saturday December 09, 2023 @01:54PM
(#38584600)
This site was originally called "Startup News" then renamed to "Hacker News".
The site is called "Hacker News" but it's predominantly existed over the years as a funnel for the business-centric Valley industry.
Which is to say that I think you're trying to apply one specific definition of "hacker" when it doesn't really work that way.