I think Louis Rossmann's heart is in the right place, his work for right for repair is genuine, his disdain for New York's intolerable bureaucracy is completely understandable and justified, but it is leading him in bad directions and has been ever since he linked up with FUTO. Never trust a billionaire and never let them delude you into thinking they care about you or anyone. He is being used for his reputation and his audience and when they are done consuming those things for the billionaire's cause's benefit he will be left with neither one and the billionaire will move on without slowing down or shedding a tear.
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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He's always been more than a little petite bourgeoisie. Among all his spats with the city of New York, I'm sure you can find something where he was at fault, but we generally only get his side of things. Still, I think he's been mostly a good advocate. FUTO is not the right place to do that.
While I can't say I agree with everything Rossmann, the guy seems very genuine, regardless of where I think he may be wrong or right. Also, I've seen him pedal back and retract plenty of times when he is shown (with evidence) that he was wrong.
Can you name one other personality with a large following that comes even close to Louis Rossmann in bringing stuff to light and fighting back against enshittification?
As for Futo, yeah, I'm pretty sure that billionaire that owns it is just using Rossmann for his following. But who knows, maybe Rossmann is also taking advantage of him to advance what we all want to see as well.
Can you name one other personality with a large following that comes even close to Louis Rossmann in bringing stuff to light and fighting back against enshittification?
Well, there's Corey Doctorow, of course. He literally wrote the book on Enshittification.
There are definitely more "behind the scenes" folks doing a lot for that particular cause who don't so much have a following of anywhere near the same size, but nonetheless do fight enshittification in big ways. Bradley Kuhn comes to mind.
I know about Corey Doctorow and his coining of the term and his book. I appreciate there are people like him, they do make a difference. I've never heard of Bradley Kuhn, thanks for pointing him out. I'll look him up.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. People like these are doing what they can to further knowledge about how shit is extremely wrong and needs to change.
Louis Rossmann uses the following he has built up over the years to carry the word on the extreme enshittification we live in, and pushes for changes that will be beneficial for us at the legislative level as much as at the operating level.
I do believe that Futo and it's owner are just trying to benefit from him, but that does not remove the fact that Rossmann has also taken advantage of Futo to improve our situation as much as he can without making a penny out of it for himself.
Honor where honor's due, that's my thing.
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What else do you expect him to do that will make an ACTUAL change? You HAVE to make some concessions when collaborating with large entities, and I think we are lucky that Louis can stay true to all of his beliefs with a large backing like FUTO, even if they aren't perfect.
I feel like I've seen stories like this before, how a popular YouTuber, or advocate isn't "perfect". People in the comments provide a "perfect" alternative, they are usually super niche and super underground. Certainly someone that hasn't yet had the chance to come under the same amount of scrutiny.
We need to be a little compromising to avoid cannibalizing our movement to achieve "purity" of our ideals, while corps continue to take ground. My two cents. Stop the bleeding first, before you worry about scars.
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eli5?
This is all in reference to this article.
FUTO is an organization that talks a lot of rhetoric about being some bastion of consumer rights in tech, but they're doing a lot of shitty, shady, and downright evil things. Among them, FUTO has been in the practice of making small grants to FOSS projects (like ffmpeg and musl) and then plastering the FOSS project's name and logo all over the FUTO site in a way that makes it seem as if FUTO is endorsed by said FOSS projects when that's not the case at all.
(All this after doing everything in their power with their rhetoric to try to discredit and degrade the entire FOSS community. They wrote an "apology", but even in the apology, they express their "disdain for OSI approved licenses". Mind you, ~~none of FUTO's projects are Open Source~~ most of their projects are proprietary.)
After that article came out just a couple of days ago, apparently they redid their site, I'd have to guess in an effort to address the concern that the way FUTO presented their grant program before implied endorsement by a lot of FOSS projects that didn't endorse them in any way. I don't think they've done enough, and there are tons of other reasons to think FUTO is evil assholes using consumer rights rhetoric to manipulate people in service to its (fully for-profit) bottom line.
Other concerns in the article include FUTO's connection to explicit/proud fascists and using their platform to (even coercing Louis Rossmann into) spread fascist propaganda.
They weren't even grants. They just donated money and said "look we're sponsoring them!", implying a relationship. As mentioned in that article, musl and ffmpeg (and probably everyone) didn't even know FUTO was doing this.
Immich it licensed under AGPL 3 and the code is open - isn't that FOSS?
I know some of their apps are licensed under a semi-open license of their own creation and that's been touchy to say the least. But is it true to say that none of their apps are FOSS?
Ah. My mistake. I'll edit my comment.
Edit: According to another comment in this post, FUTO "took over" Immich. Seems like maybe Immich was AGPLv3 before FUTO got hold of it. Still qualifies as "one of FUTO's projects", and your point is still well made, but it does still add a bit of context, and honestly I have to wonder whether future versions of Immich will remain FOSS.
They actually reliscenced from mit (or some permissive liscence) to AGPLv3 right before getting "taken over" by FUTO (futo now pays the immich devs to work full time on the project)
I'll be honest- never even heard of futo outside the context of immich (and I don't even run it.) Interesting to hear they have anything besides that.
I've clicked through the links and the most 'evil' thing they did seems to be using a non-mainstream open source licence? Evil is getting contracted by Israel. Prohibiting other companies from profiting off your work isn't evil.
Edit: And they hosted an interview with Curtis Yarvin. That's bad, but still doesn't warrant calling them evil.
Honestly getting tired of the purity tests. The alternatives are horrific. Google. Apple. Meta. So please find me the FOSS project that is perfectly free of sin which I'm allowed to support.
At this point it begins to feel as though this DDV is only here to write takedown pieces on projects not deemed pure enough for the cause.
FUTO hosted an interview once with a POS guy. Oh, the horror. Please help me understand what that has to do with the existence of a keyboard that isn't spyware. Yeah no. I'll keep supporting the working alternatives, you have fun using absolutely nothing because "What if one of the devs wasn't a good person??!"
I absolutely agree with your statement. Hell, even the GNU project (RMS mostly) had their own scandal a while ago, so if you really insist on being pedantic about this matter feel free on removing practically every piece of open source software from your systems.
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Yeah, the keyboard is source available, that's good enough for me.
Everyone acting like they've never heard of "Free as in Freedom not as in Free Beer"
They give you the source. They let you modify it and use it, just don't make billions off someone else's freely available work.
How that translates to "most of their stuff is proprietary" and the one smartass that thinks it's a good argument to say "ffmpeg doesn't mind their code being used in YouTube, why should you?"
Until we collapse capitalism the billionaires will take our hard work and make billions off of it until they force kill our projects and replace them with proprietary closed source shit. A license that prohibits corporations from making profit off our work is A-OK.
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I don't get you people. The founder of FUTO literally platforming a fascist is beyond just purity test level of bad.
I can call Eron out for being a supporter of fascists, while using FUTO keyboard because it doesn't spy on me, that's perfectly fine. I don't get why using their keyboard means you have to defend the horrible position held by the people behind it. Sounds like cognitive dissonance.
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Thanks for posting this. Just uninstalled Futo keyboard and its neighboring speech to text app. Gotta hunt around for a replacement on both, tho I've been using Heliboard, which is okay. Still really bad at swipe predictions.
The voice recognition is honestly the best I've ever used. It'll be a shame to give it up.
If I decide to switch keyboards, I'm certain I would go back to HeliBoard.
There's been a real explosion of open source voice recognition over the past few months, and I haven't tested a lot. Whisper+ looks like a promising one. Before using Futo, I used Sayboard, which I was pretty happy with.
Careful, I heard one of the Heliboard devs kicked a puppy once. How dare you support such Evil software?!
/s because sadly that's needed
Transcribro is another that looks promising.
Their voice recognition is just OpenAI Whisper. Transcribro uses the exact same thing. It's just not built into a handy key on the keyboard.
I was really loving Futo keyboard, but when companies are tied to any atrocities, or in this case, plain general evil, it's really tough to stick with. I jumped very briefly over to Sayboard before your post (saw it on F-Droid), but I'm hoping Whisper+ works better, as I think I'll simultaneously be using it for my upcoming HA voice assistant project.
If you are comfortable using F-Droid or Obtainium I found HeliBoard to be a good keyboard replacement: https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard
Sadly anything not going through the Google Play store is currently under attack: https://f-droid.org/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html
Hah! That's why I said I was using Heliboard :P As noted, not the greatest text prediction. e.g. I'll type "in" specifically starting over the I, and it still types "on", and it also doesn't like shorthand wording, like "gonna" which every time gets replaced with "Gibbs"
Still better than the Google keyboard with its billion all-seeing eyes on you.
🤦♂️ Sometimes I wonder who those people are who immediately jump to conclusions because they can't be bothered to read a simple paragraph of text. Me. The answer is - it's me!
Hopefully something good still came out of it. Maybe as someone else recommended adding your frequently used words to your dictionary will help with word sugggestions.
Hah, well if you posted at the time you did and you're in my timezone (EST), I can see glancing over it being an ish :P
Can't you just put the shorthand words you want in a personal dictionary? That worked for me. Able to type words not in the default dictionary without autocorrecting.
I suppose I could have, but I'm still somewhat babystepping in Heliboard. I think if I give it a bit more time, it'll click better. I guess I was just so used to the seemingly solid prediction options for Google Keyboard way back. But having less of my info passing over to them, the better.
I just switched to Heliboard. I like it, but I wish it had swiping.
It does, if you are willing to use the google binaries. It's on their github page.
Oh damn, guess I should've like, read the documentation or something. Thanks!
They secretly funded projects without letting the recipients know it was them funding and then added their names and logos to their site without permission. When someone spoke out against this, they harassed them. This is in addition to a lot of behavior supporting fascists.
what facist projects?
The article I linked in another comment explains more, but Eron Wolf, founder of FUTO, kindof pressured or hoodwinked Louis Rossmann into publicly interviewing Curtis Yarvin who happily refers to himself as a "reactionary fascist" and publicly states that black people are inherently suitable for enslavement.
I don't know that it's so much that they support "fascist projects" as much as they go out of their way to be a platform for spreading fascist propaganda, and particularly promoting the fascist Curtis Yarvin.
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