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To quote from one of your links:

Funding is like oxygen. Organisms that do not have circulatory systems can only grow to the size of insects.

Yet insects are by far the most populous group of animals on earth and often excell in cooperation and some form huge meta-organisms.

If the idea that drives the Fediverse wants to succeed we need to build 60.000 volunteer run Pixelfed etc. instances, and that is not an unrealistic number at all, but it takes time.

You can’t shortcut this process with more funding and commercial companies, because if you try, you end up with something completely different and most likely with another monopoly.

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db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
You’re arguing with a right-libertarian, FYI. This should explain some of their positions and arguments better.

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- rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  a right-libertarian
  
  You have no idea how wrong you are, but if this is what you need to believe to sleep at night, I won’t be able or interested in changing your mind.
  
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  - db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    If it quacks like a duck, and it walks like a duck…
    
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rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Yet insects are by far the most populous group of animals on earth and often excell in cooperation and some form huge meta-organisms.

I once had this conversation with some other “indie entrepreneur” who was arguing something along the lines of “I don’t care about VC funding because my competitors all come and go, and my business still endures.” When I asked “Does this mean that you can make out a living out of your business?” and his response was “no, but I have a full time job, so my business is default alive”

He wasn’t too happy when I pointed out (a) he had a hobby, not a business and (b) cockroaches are also optimized for survival, but outlasting your competitors mean jack shit if they are playing a different ball game. He spent all this time pretending to have a business while his competition was actually out there fighting for customers.

All of this to say: there is no consolation in being “right” in my death bed. I am not interested in something that “takes time” if in the mean time my kids are growing up in a world dominated by Big Tech. Anyone who understands how bad Big Tech is bad for society should be rushing and actively accelerating to build an alternative.

commercial companies (…) end up with something completely different and most likely with another monopoly.

It’s is basically impossible to create a monopoly around FOSS services. It’s a commodity with high R&D costs but zero cost to distribute and replicate. You can only jack up the prices of commodities if you collude with your competitors or create a cartel.

The main thing holding back the development of a healthy cottage industry of hosting providers, consulting services, app customization, etc is not the Big Tech players, but precisely this “culture” of people expecting services for free.

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- poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  There are plenty of examples of monopolies built on FOSS technology. Especially in social media it is more about network effects and having enough funds to buy up any potential competitors. Facebook could be FOSS and it would not change anything.
  
  The culture to expect this for “free” is not exclusive to the fediverse, and while it has been exploited by adtech companies to build large surveillance advertisement monopolies, it is by itself not wrong for people to expect that basic services are not held behind a paywall. It just needs another organisational model to function, and comercialisation is not going to work.
  
  And besides those general considerations, your healty cottage industry is a pipe dream. Digital services have a fundamentally different economic basis that leads to huge efficiency gains at scale. If you do not actively work against that, any cottage industry will quickly consolidate around a few big players and you will basically have replicated the current system.
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    examples of monopolies built on FOSS technology.
    
    Citation needed?
    
    I have no doubt that you point out some markets and see a large corporation dominating it. But a de facto monopoly? Not so much.
    
    your healty cottage industry is a pipe dream.
    
    I’m sure you know that there are plenty of small businesses making a living out of email hosting, even if Google and MS account for 80% of the market.
    
    In pretty much the same way that lots of local business just ditched their own web pages to go to Facebook, but this didn’t kill all the other website builders companies out there.
    
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    poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Now you are contradicting yourself. Sure, there are survival niches for small cockroach companies in the shawdow of the large FOSS based oligopolies, but that is the status quo and no improvement at all.
    
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