The button on the right comes pre-installed in your phone and has already been pressed.
And all your friends already pressed it and for some reason your local police counts on it.
FOSS is great at back end, and is tremendously closer to the front end ease of private, polished software than it ever has been.
Some more push for front-end ease with reasonable support communities will push it more into the mainstream. It needs to be as easy as pressing “install” and then using it. For mass adoption, the majority of people don’t care to become technical experts.
Imo backend FOSS needs a complete rethink with an easy way to manage one’s own digital stewardship. I’ve lost a ton of data to FOSS projects (masto, lemmy, etc) just because the random host I chose decided to close up shop. Not particularly the fault of the software vendor per sae, and while I do not wish to hassle with hosting my own entire instance I’d be happy paying for or hosting my own data.
I know your service is free, open source, devoid of ads, and not trying to steal my data, but iTs NoT uSeR fRiEnDlY.
Because being user-friendly is way, way, way more important than things like privacy, not being bombarded by ads, and not supporting billionaires who use their money to influence the law to benefit themselves and harm us.
Humans are fucking lazy pieces of shit and that’s a major reason why the billionaire class keeps winning, because most of us are too lazy to learn something new or do something the hard way because “there’s already an easy way.”
Boo Boo Bear: “I do believe corporations rob us of our dignity and independence, and that these systems must be ripped down, burnt down, or leveled by any force necessary.”
Because being user-friendly is way, way, way more important than things like privacy, not being bombarded by ads,
People gravitate to the technology that they can use.
I live in a small town. Every business and service has a Facebook group because it’s usable. A couple of stalwarts maintain web pages but they’re full of inaccurate information because they’re too hard to update. The Facebook groups, on the other hand, are constantly up-to-date, and the owners are quick to respond to any comment on them.
That’s before you get to network effects. Everyone in the town uses Facebook. So when kids ask for a messaging or social media account, they ask for a Facebook product so they can talk to their friends and family.
It’s incredibly shitty. Everyone in town would agree with your sentiment, but they bounce off competing products. The effort involved in hosting a service isn’t a higher perceived cost than the ads, privacy invasion, etc.
I’m an OSS guy, but running these services is not free. Someone is paying for bandwidth, power, hardware, etc.
It’s not like there’s a lack of people running these services, and as Mastodon shows the donation model works fine. The whole point of a federated ecosystem is that the cost of operation is amortized across many different servers.
People donate time, and some people host servers and pay bills because they can. I don’t think the whole point of federation is amortizing the costs across instances, but it is a perk. Most people want to know what to join, which is why lemmy.world got so big, so fast. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ll bet their donations do not match their costs.
Mastodon is totally cool, I’m on board, but normies don’t know what it is.
I’m just being realiatic here.
Mastodon has millions of users now, so clear the model scales just fine. Meanwhile, the fact that normies don’t know what it is has nothing to do with your original point regarding hosting costs. I have no idea whether lemmy.world donations match the costs or not, but clearly given that there are plenty of Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, and Lemmy instances around now, the model works in general, and it can scale.
Well I hope so. Occasionally our nerd stuff leaks out into the world and does some real good. Maybe advertising is only needed to keep shareholders never-ending drive for profits. Wikipedia seems to do ok. I really do hope I’m wrong, but I think you are just being too optimistic, maybe it is because I’m old.
I’m personally fairly optimistic based on how much the fediverse has already grown over the past few years. I also don’t really worry about mass mainstream adoption all that much. I think the only thing that really matters is sustainability.
The three things that really matter are having enough people to do development of the platforms, enough people to host servers, and enough users to generate content.
I’d argue that all of these requirements have already been met, and that means the fediverse will be around indefinitely. It might not grow quickly, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing either. Rapid growth can be very disruptive and can derail the original ethos. I think slow and organic growth is far more preferable because new users end up internalizing the existing culture.
I’m not sure why you are getting downvoted. I’m optimistic for the same reasons and I think you are right about rapid growth being dangerous.
Linux was slow growth, not to mention GNU, but it is so good, and attracted the right kind of contribuitors.
Running these services has a cost and surely over the time it takes to grow, solutions will emerge. It is best to recognize those challenges and address them.
That’s my thinking as well, there’s an opportunity for a completely different kind of social ecosystem to develop that’s not driven by the profit motive.
