Yeah, but we’ve been on this stressful ride before, and we know where it ends.
There were lots of attempts at a closed source proprietary Internet protocol. They have all resoundly failed, after looking unbeatable. Some folks still fondly remember the closed Internet protocols like OLE COM, ActiveX, Flash, Cold Fusion, and SilverLight, but few of us miss them. Okay, I do miss Flash games.
Good touchscreen phone operating systems were a “will this ever be matched?” trade secret at Blackberry and Apple. Now the vast majority of phones run open source Android.
Much earlier, most good-enough C compilers were expensive proprietary closed source products. Now I see very little being compiled on anything other than the free and open source GCC. Even most other programming languages and tools are now FOSS, as well. I can’t think of much for development that cracks the top 20 that isn’t FOSS. JetBrains IDEs stand out as a lone closed source hold-out.
Open standards always win, in the end.
The desktop computing default is honestly way overdue to switch to FOSS. That’s why it’s the year of the Linux desktop.
The Fediverse is here to stay, and is all that’ll be left in a couple decades. But in the meantime, it’s cozy!
Yep. It often takes quite awhile. And I honestly don’t mind supporting innovators who want to sell something closed but really good.
But as I get older, and watch the pattern over and over, I’m starting to appreciate skipping the cycle by directly adopting the open thing as early as I can.
yeah, the general rule of thumb seems to be that if it’s universal, it needs to be open. The farther niche it goes, the less open it has to be, on principle of utility. Open standards are only good people it’s so easy for them to get accepted. That’s why closed standards often just don’t go very far.
Hard to tell imo. Big tech has a lot of big advantages and disadvantages over us.
Being centralized and heavily funded, it’s a lot easier for them to rapidly create/change new things, for better or for worse. It also means they do a lot of the testing for us. Mastodon/Lemmy formats are figured out from what we liked from proprietary platforms, then we kept the core that made it good. We also don’t need to make a worse user experience by worrying about monetization.
We also have a lot less development, and I won’t even pretend that Mastodon or Lemmy are anywhere near well developed as Reddit/Twitter backends and other software. We simply don’t have the attention and funding to be anywhere near that level.
I don’t think we’ll ever replace big tech, but I just hope we stay on a healthy trajectory where we are alongside them in popularity.
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Yeah, but we’ve been on this stressful ride before, and we know where it ends.
There were lots of attempts at a closed source proprietary Internet protocol. They have all resoundly failed, after looking unbeatable. Some folks still fondly remember the closed Internet protocols like OLE COM, ActiveX, Flash, Cold Fusion, and SilverLight, but few of us miss them. Okay, I do miss Flash games.
Good touchscreen phone operating systems were a “will this ever be matched?” trade secret at Blackberry and Apple. Now the vast majority of phones run open source Android.
Much earlier, most good-enough C compilers were expensive proprietary closed source products. Now I see very little being compiled on anything other than the free and open source GCC. Even most other programming languages and tools are now FOSS, as well. I can’t think of much for development that cracks the top 20 that isn’t FOSS. JetBrains IDEs stand out as a lone closed source hold-out.
Open standards always win, in the end.
The desktop computing default is honestly way overdue to switch to FOSS. That’s why it’s the year of the Linux desktop.
The Fediverse is here to stay, and is all that’ll be left in a couple decades. But in the meantime, it’s cozy!
to be fair, this was almost certainly a reaction to the iphone. Still open, so there’s that.
Seems like the cycle is either:
Yep. It often takes quite awhile. And I honestly don’t mind supporting innovators who want to sell something closed but really good.
But as I get older, and watch the pattern over and over, I’m starting to appreciate skipping the cycle by directly adopting the open thing as early as I can.
yeah, the general rule of thumb seems to be that if it’s universal, it needs to be open. The farther niche it goes, the less open it has to be, on principle of utility. Open standards are only good people it’s so easy for them to get accepted. That’s why closed standards often just don’t go very far.
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From experience, Lemmy/Mastadon is a lot easier to pitch to potential users than Linux lol
Hard to tell imo. Big tech has a lot of big advantages and disadvantages over us.
Being centralized and heavily funded, it’s a lot easier for them to rapidly create/change new things, for better or for worse. It also means they do a lot of the testing for us. Mastodon/Lemmy formats are figured out from what we liked from proprietary platforms, then we kept the core that made it good. We also don’t need to make a worse user experience by worrying about monetization.
We also have a lot less development, and I won’t even pretend that Mastodon or Lemmy are anywhere near well developed as Reddit/Twitter backends and other software. We simply don’t have the attention and funding to be anywhere near that level.
I don’t think we’ll ever replace big tech, but I just hope we stay on a healthy trajectory where we are alongside them in popularity.
Thank you, u/cum, for your thoughtful insight.