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.
(The most generous current estimate of IIS market share for Internet hosting is 3%, and that’s probably being extremely generous. A more likely number is under .5%.)
We saw companies try and fail to privatize HTML many times: (ActiveX, Flash, SilverLight, various versions of IE).
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?
Open source will eventually create viable platforms, I’m not giving up until platforms successfully campaign to kill free alternatives
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.
(The most generous current estimate of IIS market share for Internet hosting is 3%, and that’s probably being extremely generous. A more likely number is under .5%.)
We saw companies try and fail to privatize HTML many times: (ActiveX, Flash, SilverLight, various versions of IE).
Open specifications always win.
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?