Having everyone have to discover the pro/con's of every system themselves, in the dark, with no social media / blogging around it, seems like a very strange position to me.

Technology should be highly social. Especially open source! It in unique-for-technology ways gives us something real to be social over. We can share and unfold and unpack.

This isn't entirely what you are talking about but Architectures of Open Source is still one of the best "what is this" explorations of the tech world out there. I think good advocacy has a lot of these elements (if not so total) in it. In ways that can show the bigger pictures, which AOSA at it's best does! https://aosabook.org/en/

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nomel an hour ago | parent [-]

You're arguing a point I never made. Experience can be shared without the intent to manipulate/persuade towards a common cause, which is the definition of "rally". A blog post/social media about experience of use is NOT a rally, and a rally is NOT required, and in fact makes a post suspect, because that's means the person is probably hiding negative aspects, with their intent to promote, rather than just showing reality.

	▲	jauntywundrkind 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You're taking a slant on the rally, to turn a possible downside into something greviously fatal. That's not intrinsic in what I was talking about. We can have clear identifying gathering points, touchstones, blog posts, etc that call the cause without having to hide and conceal. This argument you are making is extremely uncharitable, and assumes bad motives from the start. This is just a descent into more fervor, saying nothing. Let's skip the stupid lawyerly word picking of zero value contestation. Please. I think the macro subject stands. In neither the old world where everyone was doing their own thing nor the new one where >50% use systemd to run a significant amount of their systems: in neither case was or is there a strong practice of sharing and doing the work of exchange (certainly not without counterexample, yada yada, and I've already provided some in other threads, namely AOSA, but I stand by my assertion here). We can ignore which path is better, and simply say: both paths should do more to create broad discussion, ideally that is constructive, that covers what is working, the big picture outlook, and the negative sides of the world they're living in. I think of that as rallying not to zealotry, but as rallying to understanding, trying to draw people in, so we can see and perceive what are in fact stable, alluring points of the world. So that we can let people know what an option might be. I think the Din and Darkness is winning against those who want to gather and protect the light. The anti forces are everywhere and persistent, the doers are quiet and busy. Civilization would be healthier with more deliberate work to share the light, to show and exchange specifics (as most systemd touching blog posts do) but also broader pictures, wider stances.