I assume if Lemmy ever got big enough to be an actual threat, the big guys would do something about it. I’m not sure what though, but something.
makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I understand and obviously agree or else I wouldn’t be vaguely gestures to everyone around him
But let’s not live in fantasy land. Capitalism rules the internet and like it’s old predecessor Feudalism there’s one rule. Bigger Army (bank account) diplomacy. None of the other rules matter if you’re big enough to write them. Nobody will willingly give up their level of control of the internet and everyone who takes it will do so with the objective of replacing them not dethroning
jaybone@lemmy.world 3 months ago
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 3 months ago
It will be monetized at some point. It’s free data and people are scraping it. Google will inject ads via Chrome until people move to another browser, who knows. Capitalism always finds a way.
Cuntessera@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
It’s not a war to win. What’s best will eventually win 🤷🏻♂️ The future is decentralized because - sooner or later- every idiot will realize that putting absolute power in the hands of few that control our speech is maybe not the best idea. Now, that may lay far in the future, but it is the future nonetheless.
BluesF@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I admire your faith in the good sense of humanity 😉
Cuntessera@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
That’s why I said it would happen in the far future. Even the most stupid dipshits would’ve gotten it by then.
thirteene@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Open source will eventually create viable platforms, I’m not giving up until platforms successfully campaign to kill free alternatives
MajorHavoc@programming.dev 3 months ago
Yeah. We’ve already seen this effect with WordPress and Android and Apache/Nginx. There was a day when I was weird for betting against MS IIS for web hosting, and people were sure the commercial Internet would remain proprietary forever.
We saw companies try and fail to privatize HTML many (ActiveX, Flash, SilverLight, various versions of IE).
Open specifications always win.
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 3 months ago
Depends on if branding takes lead. There is a reason people use Chrome instead of Chromium. Nginx is a prime example, 99% of people think their server less hosting is some special AWS branded product, and not Kubernetes and Nginx they could run on a VM for a fraction of the cost.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
they successfully killed xmpp
letsgo@lemm.ee 3 months ago
The software’s not the problem though. Infrastructure isn’t free. You can self-host Lemmy off your own broadband for a while, but as your site grows this’ll become infeasible. So then you have to host on someone else’s hardware: AWS or whatever, and paying a few 10s or maybe a few 100s of currency per month is fine, but then suddenly you go viral and get clobbered with a bill for 50K.
Plus of course there’s the time you need to spend working on the service. It isn’t paying, by definition, so not only are you not getting an income from it you’re also not able to work at something else which could give you an income. This is fine for rich playboys but not for the rest of us wage slaves.
And so you need an income to sustain the service, and thus the descent into enshittification begins. This will only be solved when we get free infrastructure, but how?
thirteene@lemmy.world 3 months ago
You can flash a pi and have a standalone individual instance. Computing power is growing, scaling grows too. We don’t have an option for stuff like AI today, but I could host my own Lemmy instance that only supports my household for $30. Site hugs can still happen but there are still solutions; seeding partitions is one way to resolve that, reposting requires rehosting.