"the company looked at the history of social media over the past decade and didn’t like what it saw… existing companies that are only model motivated by profit and just insane user growth, and are willing to tolerate and amplify really toxic content because it looks like engagement… "
We desperately need a company like Mozilla to take the reigns of something like Lemmy. The original developers are far too biased and short sighted to see the bigger picture, it needs to be an independent group that promotes more open source development.
Where do you get that from? I have no love for tankies, but from what I’ve seen, they’ve built a product that’s free of their biases, opensourced it and thrown it over the wall with no strings attached.
If you want to make a rooten-tooten white supremacist nazi instance with Lemmy, you can do exactly that. Nobody has to federate with you, and you don’t have to federate with them.
Strange take.
While I generally agree with you, you can’t call that a strange take.
Their views are concerning, but so far I haven’t seen them trying to force their views anywhere yet. And having a fork as a real option helps mitigate a lot of that risk.
I’m certainly okay with the $50k/year they’re trying to make for working on this full time. I’d be fine with triple that.
If it gets out of hand, we have options. They’re aware of that (in fact offered it), and have been acting appropriately afaik.
The bottom line is, they started something that’s bigger than them, and created more than enough tools to fork from them if they become a problem.
I always like to point to Emby/Jellyfin as a perfect example of how this is supposed to work. They created something excellent, the community joined in, and it got popular. Then the maintainers decided to try and cash in, and the community immediately responded by forking into what would become Jellyfin. And nowadays, the discussion is between Plex vs Jellyfin, you rarely ever hear people talk about Emby anymore.
After a certain point of user adoption, FOSS (and copy-left) software should be able to stand on it’s own without the creator’s direct involvement. The community can take the wheel if necessary. The Lemmy devs have provided enough tools to do exactly that, and I believe there are more than enough experienced devs in this community that we would not struggle to find the necessary talent.
That’s doesn’t mean there isn’t still a risk, though. This is social media, the technology is only half the story. The other half is getting people to move. I don’t think I need to explain to anyone here how hard it is to get an entrenched user base to abandon a platform whose mainteners have gone off the rails.
Also: OPNsense. That wasn’t even a case of going closed, it was Netgate making weird decisions regarding hardware encryption support. Of course, since then, Netgate has fallen completely off the wagon and done some incredibly stupid and harmful things.
If someone brings a toy to class, it’s wild to me to say that if the whole class likes it enough, they must donate their toy. If you love it, go make your own - hell, just copy it exactly as it is and make adjustments from there.
It seems to me they’re saying Lemmy needs corporate backing to grow? Cause if they were so bothered by the opinions of the Lemmy devs they could simply use Kbin instead.
Well that or use an instance that isn’t theirs, or doesn’t even federate with theirs, or simply block theirs.🤔 I mean this is really throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I have no strong love for leninists/stalinists, and think they accomplish little other than making actual socialists look bad while not being socialist themselves. But I’m not that put off by them. They’re generally fairly intellectually weak, and easy to maneuver around. Should you choose to interact with them.
Kbin is not a good Lemmy replacement.
I’m not sure if this is what that person meant, but, usually it’s on the original development team to handle outreach and building the identity of the software - in Lemmy’s case, they have a bit of a not-great reputation… Even if they had the reach, that reputation hurts.
Having Mozilla - or any top tier foss-friendly company - kinda take the reins a bit would probably be good.
I’m not sure if Mozilla is the one for that job, they have their own issues with community relations. I wish they didn’t because the world needs Firefox.
The solution for capitalism-out-of-control is not more capitalism. The less big money players in the fediverse the better.
What we need is a bunch of small groups and companies. It isn’t a problem if there isn’t a giant centralization of power.
You don’t see Salsa companies ruining tomatoes
Yeah I’ve considered leaving Lemmy because of who is in charge of development right now. They were not ready for its sudden burst in popularity and are not handling it well.
Time for a repo fork?
You can have as many forks as you want, but that’s a software engineer’s solution to a social problem. Lemmy is the “name brand” now for ActivityPub based federated content aggregation, and it will be orders of magnitudes more difficult to get support for forks, both from a contributor and from a user perspective.
Just look at last year’s Twitter migration, and the sea of people complaining about Mastodon not having features they felt were a requirement for adoption, while also ignoring every other Mastodon alternative on the Fediverse that had everything they were looking for.
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It’s open source, anyone can fork the repo any time they want. The original devs won’t like it but also there is bugger all they can do about it. It’s just that it would be a full time job to take on and no one has the time.
Specifically, the model should be the Wikimedia Foundation. That is, a non-profit organization with lots of stakeholders and slow procedures to guarantee accountability, and lots of resources to guarantee it won’t go away. This is the pragmatic least-bad solution to the problem of centralization on the internet.
Wikipedia Foundation is also bloated and unfocused outside of their mainstay product. But like Mozilla, they generally do good with the bloat and unfocused resources. Inefficiencies are easy to identify but hard to mitigate.
Yes, bloat and mission creep is going to be an issue with any big non-profit. But maybe that’s also their advantage: any organization that becomes focused on sustaining itself is going to provide decent long-term stability. I guess it’s a bit like a state.
I think Mozilla has poor judgment and bad leadership. I don’t mind if they participate but they shouldn’t be in charge