Wayland is an Alternative to X
LAST year we said that X (in technology) had been able to challenge Musk's "crusade" for quite some time (see for example "X11/X.org Can Probably Sue Elon Musk").
A reader reminds us that VCs seem to be dumping money into "X alternatives". Wayland ought to play on that ignorance and position itself as an "X alternative" to get funding for further development of their graphical layer, according to this reader. Wayland is imperfect and is likely to have issues for years to come, but it's more of wordplay anyway.
There's meanwhile this new article about "Client Freedom", speaking of the Four Freedoms and real alternatives to X (Twitter). It rightly argues that "[c]lient freedom peaked in the 90s when most communication was through open protocols":
Client freedom, by analogy to the four freedoms, is the freedom to operate a third-party client to an API. Email, IRC, and RSS are open protocols with client freedom. You can read email through a native GUI app, a spartan text-only client, and even an Emacs mode.
Client freedom peaked in the 90s when most communication was through open protocols, and has been on the decline since. I remember, circa 2013, using Facebook Messenger over Pidgin, through their XMPP gateway, and with OTR messaging turned on. Then Facebook shut down its XMPP gateway, as Slack shut down its IRC gateway.
Nowadays even the Web-based stuff is just a large pile of JavaScript, bloated spyware, and some of these 'webapps' have gotten so much worse that they are DRM-laden so as to prevent people keeping their own conversations. It's truly awful.
So anyway, the alternative to X (as in Twitter) isn't social control media but something like IRC. The interface is far better and faster. █