Comment on Mastodon Exit Interview
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 week agoThere 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.
rglullis@communick.news 1 week ago
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.
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.
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.
rglullis@communick.news 1 week ago
A “cockroach business” is something that has no significant revenue but at the same time takes up so little resources that can be operated forever. This is completely different from, e.g, small email hosting providers like Migadu or some agency that gets real customers to make wordpress customizations.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
You can argue all you want about definitions, but that doesn’t change the fact that these companies are at the wim of the large oligopolies and pose absolutly no threat to them, nor do they even want to because their business indirectly depends on these oligopoles existing.