Comment on Mastodon Exit Interview
rglullis@communick.news 1 week agoexamples 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.
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.
rglullis@communick.news 1 week ago
Why? We are talking about FOSS and services based on FOSS, here. Do you think that Google would be able to successfully shut down small email providers without repercussions?
Why is that relevant? I do not particularly care about eliminating the large corporations, at least not from the start. I’d be more than happy if we could grow this ecosystem here to become a sizable share of the overall market.
I’d rather work towards a world where Facebook has “only” 70% of the market to themselves and the rest of us foment a healthy economy sustaining the other 30%, than to keep this delusional idea that a scrappy bunch of nerds are going to be able to take Lemmy/Mastodon/PixelFed/Matrix/XMPP to the mainstream by wishful thinking and “community” alone.