They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
The reason open source solutions never end up overtaking these stupid services that come out and then commit suicide every 7 years is because they’re always technically inferior at first, and oftentimes the open source alternative doesn’t even have anything remotely close to the paid service on the roadmap.
Maybe this is because of the issues with scaling up a dev team that’s formerly just been driven entirely by people’s free time, maybe it’s just that the ball never gets rolling to begin with, and only people who are ideologically vested in the idea of open source over even their own efficacy of use are the only people who are going to use these alternatives, who knows. Probably, it’s just that venture capital is usually willing to back the private, “presentable” company, over the open source guys, for pretty obvious reasons.
It’s just short term interest vs. long term interest. In our current economic layout, the former wins pretty consistently. I’d even go so far as to say that the former wins pretty consistently with most kinds of human planning just generally.
I do not have a good solution to this problem.
Do you believe then that all the work from people here is pointless, and that people are just going to leave Lemmy for the next new shiny thing?
I worry that you may be right, but at the same time I can not avoid the “History repeats itself. First as tragedy then as farce”:
It frustrates me to no end to think that the average Lemmy user is carrying a very expensive iPhone, yet can not be bothered to contribute even $1/month to the developers. It honestly makes me think sometimes that they deserve all the shit that keeps happening. It’s not for lack of warning.
I mean partially, yeah. I dunno.
I think in total I kinda just don’t see the migration, for these things, as a big issue. Any sort of, more crystalized or important knowledge, is usually saved on some ancient forum somewhere, or a book, or the internet archive, something to that effect, so realistically we’re not losing a whole lot with every migration, except for the kind of, ambient fomo and depression that people tend to have whenever they experience the death of anything, even a kind of shitty internet platform. The death of possibility that it represents.
I mean it’s maybe kind of annoying, right, to see this happen repetitively, and for it to be the case that we can never have any “real progress” with any of these applications, right. Everything has to be conceived of as a totally new and independent thing, and nobody can every build on anyone else’s work. At the same time, people naturally leap to whatever the next best thing is when these services evaporate, so we usually don’t end up losing all that much in terms of technological progression. I’m also not too sure that you can really improve on Discord that much. It already has all your different chatting and video streaming needs, there’s not much more you could do without just kinda, turning it into a totally different kind of thing.
I think maybe a more pressing issue, or annoyance, for me, is those actual monopolies which crop up. Shit like youtube, that’s probably a bigger problem. They have the total power of a video sharing platform, if anything gets erased from there, it’s probably just straight gone, because everyone kind of assumes that the servers are just going to remain free and freely accessible forever. I guess you could always just save your videos, though, but maybe that presents some kind of unsung cost of like, ease of accessibility, right. There’s not a great way to sift through all of the millions of hours of video content uploaded every second anyways, so I don’t know if it ends up mattering much, most of the time.
In sum I also think it’s kind of, misguided to blame the consumer for these sorts of behaviors. They’re that way because they’ve been propagandized too, because their friends all migrate and they are powerless to stop it, etc. The real things at work here are just like, the arbitrary forces of venture capital and the market, and the market regulation that surrounds all of this.