In your scenario, Lemmy was worse than Kbin and didn’t suit users needs as well, and didn’t evolve the protocol fast enough to keep up. Kbin deserved to win in that case.
The problem with that argument is that there’s value in something being not Facebook/Meta (or Twitter, or another corporate owned and run mega service), but that value isn’t as easy to demonstrate as “here’s a bunch of shiny features”, and once people are locked in, the focus shifts from improving the service to monetizing the service, making it rapidly worse for everyone.
People largely don’t think about how the services they use are structured, until any inherent structural issues come back to bite them. Twitter’s an obvious example, with people who were dependent on it for their livelihood from a networking/advertisement perspective ending up in trouble when the service went south. Reddit’s another example, although how that ends up is still TBD.
Nobody is saying it doesn’t “deserve” to win, whatever that means in a federated non-profit social network. The issue is that kbin probably wouldn’t be an asshole that intentionally created compatibility issues with lemmy just because they are in a superior position on the market in order to kill its ‘competition’. Meta absolutely will without a second thought.
You pretty much confirmed his point. His entire idea is that it doesn’t have to be Kbin that makes better features, Kbin was simply an example. It could be Meta that makes better features. Open source developers will never be able to compete feature-wise with a corporation that will deliberately pour money into making more features than the open source developers, and Meta definitely won’t make them open source. Hence, as per your wording “Meta deserved to win in that case”, which is exactly what we’d want to avoid.
Your point is the worse product should win? Open source can totally compete on features: we have way more developers than them. With Linux I can have basically any feature I want if I tinker enough. It’s about: what’s the best software for people?
My point is that this “fight” between products shouldn’t happen in the first place because Meta is pretty much guaranteed to win that fight. Assuming open source can compete on features (which I seriously doubt) and has more developers, those are people working for free mostly doing their own passion project. In terms of actual working hours corporations like Meta have that army of developers beaten by a mile. In terms of velocity, how fast a corporation can push out features vs how fast an open source community could do it, the corporation wins. Maybe eventually the open source solution reaches feature parity, but by that time it doesn’t matter because everyone is using the product that pushed out the features faster.
And that would be the better product until the enshittification begins and monetization kills all that was good. It’s literally why people are moving from Reddit to Lemmy, because if we leave the enshittification aside then Reddit is objectively the better product. If you think the better product should win then Lemmy shouldn’t even exist because Reddit is just better. But it does exist and it’s growing because the better product is being cashed out. If you just think about the “what’s the best software” you end up with Reddit 2.0.
Reddit is not a better product if you require the “supports 3rd party apps” feature. We can build things their business model doesn’t support. I do not agree with your premise that open software is necessarily worse.
In your scenario, Lemmy was worse than Kbin and didn’t suit users needs as well, and didn’t evolve the protocol fast enough to keep up. Kbin deserved to win in that case.
The problem with that argument is that there’s value in something being not Facebook/Meta (or Twitter, or another corporate owned and run mega service), but that value isn’t as easy to demonstrate as “here’s a bunch of shiny features”, and once people are locked in, the focus shifts from improving the service to monetizing the service, making it rapidly worse for everyone.
People largely don’t think about how the services they use are structured, until any inherent structural issues come back to bite them. Twitter’s an obvious example, with people who were dependent on it for their livelihood from a networking/advertisement perspective ending up in trouble when the service went south. Reddit’s another example, although how that ends up is still TBD.
Nobody is saying it doesn’t “deserve” to win, whatever that means in a federated non-profit social network. The issue is that kbin probably wouldn’t be an asshole that intentionally created compatibility issues with lemmy just because they are in a superior position on the market in order to kill its ‘competition’. Meta absolutely will without a second thought.
EEE does not work by outperforming the OSS alternative. The extensions will be proprietary, and won’t be able to be ported to Lemmy.
There is no competing feature-wise against a major corporation. And Facebook doesn’t deserve to win.
You pretty much confirmed his point. His entire idea is that it doesn’t have to be Kbin that makes better features, Kbin was simply an example. It could be Meta that makes better features. Open source developers will never be able to compete feature-wise with a corporation that will deliberately pour money into making more features than the open source developers, and Meta definitely won’t make them open source. Hence, as per your wording “Meta deserved to win in that case”, which is exactly what we’d want to avoid.
Your point is the worse product should win? Open source can totally compete on features: we have way more developers than them. With Linux I can have basically any feature I want if I tinker enough. It’s about: what’s the best software for people?
My point is that this “fight” between products shouldn’t happen in the first place because Meta is pretty much guaranteed to win that fight. Assuming open source can compete on features (which I seriously doubt) and has more developers, those are people working for free mostly doing their own passion project. In terms of actual working hours corporations like Meta have that army of developers beaten by a mile. In terms of velocity, how fast a corporation can push out features vs how fast an open source community could do it, the corporation wins. Maybe eventually the open source solution reaches feature parity, but by that time it doesn’t matter because everyone is using the product that pushed out the features faster.
And that would be the better product until the enshittification begins and monetization kills all that was good. It’s literally why people are moving from Reddit to Lemmy, because if we leave the enshittification aside then Reddit is objectively the better product. If you think the better product should win then Lemmy shouldn’t even exist because Reddit is just better. But it does exist and it’s growing because the better product is being cashed out. If you just think about the “what’s the best software” you end up with Reddit 2.0.
Reddit is not a better product if you require the “supports 3rd party apps” feature. We can build things their business model doesn’t support. I do not agree with your premise that open software is necessarily worse.