People say capitalism is efficient, yet Twitter has around 5,OOO employees while Mastodon was built pretty much single handedly by Eugene Rochko. Today, Mastodon provides a strictly superior user experience with only a handful of contributors.

Majority of effort at Twitter is directed towards things like ads and tracking that are actively harmful from user perspective. Meanwhile, the core functionality of the platform that benefits the users can be implemented with a small fraction of the effort.

Seems to me that capitalism is actually far more inefficient than open source development in practice.

  • @big
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    4 years ago

    They usually say “markets are efficient at serving consumer wants” and most of those desires are manufactured if you ask me. Markets have to be regulated to offset big companies that want to cruise on inefficient monopoly-stifle-everybody-else mode for as long as possible.

    What you are getting at touches on the element of competition, which brings differentiation to products so that they can be made in ways you find ethical at the price you are willing to pay, in this case also zero. The Open Source replicas come with all the fragility and concern for future maintenance and churn that is unbearable to ponder for most, so they accept ads into their life until something really worth changing to comes along.

    Got to remember too, it’s easy to copy design decisions after they’ve been thoroughly tested for user stickiness. Things that seems simple in hindsight probably required great insight and gusto to confirm with the angry market, who don’t even know what they want (you know the Faster Horses Henry Ford quote). I have to keep reminding myself that the underlying tech piping is usually secondary… facebook could have been built in 1999 with the same tech but the ubiquity of access at the timing of actual release was simply perfect.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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      34 years ago

      It’s true that the commercial social media platforms introduce some novelty occasionally, but a lot of that is also inspired by existing ideas in practice. Discussion forums have existed for as long as the internet has been around. Meanwhile, a lot of the innovation introduced by companies like Twitter and Facebook is actively harmful to mental health. So, perhaps it’s not the kind of innovation we need in the first place.

      I’d also argue the opposite regarding open source sustainability, and would go as far as to say that it is the only type of software worth investing into. No matter how great a commercial piece of software might be, sooner or later it’s going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn’t suit you. Commercial software has to constantly chase profit for the company to stick around. This necessarily means that the product has to continue evolving to chase what’s currently in vogue. And if a company fails to do that, then it will die and the software will stopped being developed.

      This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a product that you rely on. Instead of the product being adapted to your needs, it’s you who has to adapt to the way the product evolves, or spend the time investing in a different product.

      On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they’re often developed by the users who themselves benefit from these projects. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams. Mastodon is evolution of GNU social, which never got big, but stuck around despite its niche status because it had a community of people willing to maintain it. This would not have been possible for a commercial product where the company would’ve just gone out of business instead.