I’m a FOSS (free and open source software) contributor and enthusiast. So I prefer to use such products (Lemmy instead of Reddit, Linux instead of Windows, Firefox instead of Chrome, Signal instead of WhatsApp, you get the idea). Was just thinking that if everyone moved to such solutions, the tech and ad industry would lose billions of dollars. That would translate to governments losing billions of dollars in tax revenue. Would such a move ever be encouraged then by the governments?
Great, so even on Lemmy ‘Shower Thoughts’ are just statements.
I work in tech. Some would lose, but others would win. We spend more and more every year on services. The software isn’t entirely FOSS, but the licensing cost is often trivial compared to the costs to implement and maintain. For instance, we use WordPress for our website. We give thousands every year to our web designers while spending 0 on the software. The big software we use, that we spend hundreds of thousands yearly on, is moving in the same direction. I suspect they will go FOSS in the next decade, and focus on hosting/professional services.
I don’t know the solution but I do know that we’re losing what the internet was suppose to be.
I remember in the early days how we all thought it was insane and unethical to create scarcity in data.
We all knew data could be copied and shared almost limitlessly and so the internet was headed towards this new post information scarcity world were we could all collaborate and share information and knowledge and culture.
It seems like now we’re putting up walls everywhere and charging for access to every bit of data we can. I think as an online culture that we lost a lot of that early 00s mentality of what the net would be.
I feel like we dropped that baton and the newer generation is almost pro data scarcity.
Just because software is Free as in libre doesn’t mean it’s free as in beer. Running those services costs huge amount of money. Running enough instances of lemmy to replace reddit would cost collectively much more than the one optimized centralized service. So I guess that would translate to governments making billions of dollars in tax revenue.
If that is the case then how is Lemmy/the Fediverse going to be financially sustainable in the long run?
Donations, people always give Wikipedia as an example. You need to chip in every now and then. Wouldn’t that be better than “free” but your every click, scroll and interaction being tracked and you having an advertising profile being built in the background?
Smaller communities taking care and paying for themselves and just using federation to talk to everyone else. But yeah, I don’t think anyone has a really good answer for that yet. Everyone is against advertisement here and any other way of financing other than donations. Donations work well as long as the admins have fun with their work and are willing to do it for free.
What are the chances that the instance owners join together and buid a cartel or corporation. Then sells our data.
Fairly little right now, right now nobody cares about lemmy. They don’t need to sell your data because all the data on the fediverse, especially /kbin and lemmy is available for free via the API to everyone to take. Nobody would pay for it.
Besides the unsettling idea that we are like a message board in public display. It’s good to know that our data are somewhat immune to being monetized. .
We are never immune to being monetized. I guarantee right now there are MBA chucklefucks who’s jobs are hinging on finding a way to monetize the fediverse, and then implement it. Meta is working on the right now. The question is how do we defend our spaces from corporate bullshit.
Governments pay huge amounts of money for software licenses, mainly to Microsoft. So it would save them a lot of money too.
That is quite true. Though there’s another con if everyone moved to FOSS, the governments will then have less control and access to user data. Right now they can just ask Microsoft, Meta and Google and they readily give minute by minute account of a person and hordes of data. Signal, linux distros, etc don’t collect anything in the first place.
How is that a con? Seems like a pretty big “pro” to me.
Con for the governments, big pro for us obvious.
Well, it won’t be supported by governments – the tax dollars they lose are nothing compared to the communication they no longer control.
That aside, most regular folks want something easy and established before they’ll use it. I think that’s the main issue to entry of FOSS stuff for people who aren’t otherwise engaged in the ecosystem. Lemmy got an unusual leg up from the implosion of reddit.
The cost is hardly in the software. It’s for the support and setup. Even if governments switch to Linux, they’d need some sort of support contract in place with a vendor.
Lolol that’s absurdly optimistic and completely ignores commercial contributions. No licences hardly means less expensive.
Lolol that’s absurdly optimistic and completely ignores commercial contributions. No licences hardly means less expensive.
Lolol that’s absurdly optimistic and completely ignores commercial contributions. No licences hardly means less expensive.
Lolol that’s absurdly optimistic and completely ignores commercial contributions. No licences hardly means less expensive.
