From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.

There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.

All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.

Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.

Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.

#duolingo #languagelearning #enshittification #capitalism

Here are the newest community submissions to Mozilla Connect -- these are features you'd like to see in #Thunderbird (and eventually, Thunderbird for #Android).

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas/label-name/thunderbird/tab/most-recent

Add your opinions to the mix, and vote on the ones you believe in.

I was just thinking about this earlier this evening and wanted to do what I think will be an interesting poll.

Before you joined the #fediverse, what was your relationship with or knowledge of #foss #opensource software?

Please boost for exposure, and feel free to explain your answers in the replies and tell me how it has changed since joining the fediverse! Thanks!