I’m really enjoying lemmy. I think we’ve got some growing pains in UI/UX and we’re missing some key features (like community migration and actual redundancy). But how are we going to collectively pay for this? I saw an (unverified) post that Reddit received 400M dollars from ads last year. Lemmy isn’t going to be free. Can someone with actual server experience chime in with some back of the napkin math on how expensive it would be if everyone migrated from Reddit?
As paradoxical as it is, I think that these open source non-profit projects are a lot more efficient than profit-driven, debt-fueled corporations.
First of all, the main contributors to a FOSS project do it for passion and do not take a salary.
Secondly, they don’t have the infinite growth mindset that pushes enterpreneurs to to spend as much as possible for maximum growth, all financed by a growing amount of investors (and debt, which costs interest fees).
If a FOSS project reaches maximum capacity, they will close subscriptions, they will throttle traffic, i.e. they will slow down growth, but they will not go into debt. Slowing down growth is something that a for-profit company would never do (at least until the interest rates were low and the investors were plenty, today idk). Eventually someone else in the community will decide to do a generous donation or open their own instance.
Imo that the private sector has the label of efficient is something only themselves have pushed and subsequently stuck as common knowledge. As far as I can see, the private sector is equally ridden with inefficiency.
Equally? Exponentially.
Anyone who’s worked private sector, especially as a subcontractor, knows that private industry is entirely bloat. For every one productive hour of labor, there’s 10 hours of bullshit middle management and admin work.
This becomes more clear when you call it the Free Software movement instead of Open Source. It’s a movement that focuses on user freedom and that’s why it was created. Open Source doesn’t share the same values.
Very well put
I don’t get it. Why would you call that more efficient? In your example a profit driven company will grow at a higher rate than a FOSS project right ? So in what way is it more efficient?
Yeah your issue is youre looking it from the perspective of a cancer cell. Growth isnt always good. Too much growth and you run out of resources. Keeping things sustainable and self sufficient and not reliant on loans and “infinite growth” ponzi economics tends to work better in the long run. (Example: libraries)
i think they mean efficient in terms of resource usage, not growth.
Honestly I thought they meant resource efficient, cause we don’t need to track the users every swipe (plus another million fingerprinting methods), which saves a heck load of clocks. There’s also almost no per user saved data minus the most basic subscriptions, so everything just runs better
I think the second point is the one that makes the biggest difference. If there is a need for new features, people will make them. If there is a reason for people to join, they will join. Steady state is much easier to manage.