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?
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.
Infra cost isn’t as high. A company reaping a billion in profit yearly would be spending around 10-20M only on infra (my previous company had 100M users and this is the estimate from that). So a nonprofit would just seek funds for infra and dev cost. Of course, it all depends on the kind of platform. But how about people embracing FOSS? Switching to Linux from Windows, to LibreOffice from O365, to GrapheneOS/LineageOS from Android, to Firefox from Chrome, that sort of thing. It’d be a drastic blow to the revenue of these companies. What people used to pay for earlier, they’d not be paying anymore. Maybe this would translate to other things like the cost of laptops and mobile phones rising because manufacturers will no longer be incentivised from software companies.
If that is the case then how is Lemmy/the Fediverse going to be financially sustainable in the long run?
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.
I think it depends on how much the majority of users end up caring. Anytime something gets fucky, anybody in the world can create a new instance, or new community and if users care they can move to and support that one.
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?
That makes sense, but Wikipedia is one “instance” instead of hundreds. If many instances start depending on donations and you are subscribed to even just a couple of them, donating to every single one could seem a little much, right? Not trying to be negative, just starting to wrap my head around this.
Probably donations
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.
I remember the general feeling you talked about, and the insanity of the idea when DRM was introduced.
It seems we vastly underestimated the ideas corporations can produce and implement.
For a short while it seemed as if with AI the field would be leveled again, but then I was astonished how quickly the EU moved with regulations first and foremost to protect copyright.
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.
And I know from first hand experience that those “not the corporate one” vendors that (often local) governments try to get their stuff from are not able to offer their products or services at comparable quality. Years ago my public university, via some half-baked initiative by the state in an attempt to protect data and employ local talent and whatnot, tried to ditch Dropbox and O365 etc. in favor of some locally made stuff. It was an unmitigated disaster, especially the absolute piece of shit that was supposed to replace Dropbox. On the rare occasions that it did actually work, it simply was nowhere near as useful or convenient or performant as Dropbox. As a result people avoided that shit like the plague and started sharing their files through other, arguably shadier platforms instead. Until they finally rolled the actually usable alternative that’s in service now, the documents were hosted on all sorts of shitty websites with no access control.
AFAIK the Office alternative failed completely and they’re back to where they were, maybe even deeper into 365 actually.
Open Office etc. have been tried by governments with varying degrees of success. I think Germany is the best known example.
One issue that isn’t really about the software is the accountability. If it breaks, or it breaks something else, who’s is responsible? Governments can either pay a lot of money to fix it themselves or wait and hope for someone else to do it eventually. With paid software it’s a lot easier to confront the tech company because they were already paid for it to work, so the responsibility of it working is very clear. Also using “industry standards” ensures that someone else has he same problem, so there are many others who also want it fixed.
The days where every company had an IT-department is long gone. Today software needs to work without individual customization. Thankfully there are also better standards for everything like documents, file exchanges, APIs etc., so technically open source ought to be able to do it just as well as commercial software. It’s just that we also know that software is never really finished or complete. It has to be updated continuously because things keeps evolving. That is more difficult when not using the de facto standard.
Remember too that this is my companies like Microsoft and Adobe are adamant about getting their products in to the education sector. Once people have grown up with certain software suites, they’re uncomfortable with anything else and will almost collectively demand them from an employer.
The biggest problem is, nobody from the tech industry is going to fund an application specifically designed to be non-commercial unless they’re legally forced to. Which means that reach and development power are always going to stay behind the proprietary alternatives
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.
It’s a “parable of the broken window”. We’re wasting time and effort on proprietary software. You (OP) are now spending that time and effort on other stuff that you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. So somebody is still getting paid, it’s just not the ad industry.
Great, so even on Lemmy ‘Shower Thoughts’ are just statements.
I did write a whole paragraph below the title, do people have more complex shower thoughts?
No, the fact it’s so complex is part of the problem. It’s an interesting discussion to be had but it’s not a Shower Thought.
A Shower Thought is something like “If Eminem’s Mom wanted to she could probably make a good amount of money selling her own spaghetti sauce” (stole this from Reddit). It’s a random thought that comes to you, serves no real purpose but still just kind of lingers in your mind.
Ah gotcha.
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.
Reminds me of this I’ve seen in lemmy: https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html
And I feel like I agree. Let’s spend our time coding more strong copyleft. Not because it’s cheaper but because it’s better.
Depends on what you mean by “tech industry”. If FOSS projects are outside the realm of “tech industry”, then yes. The users and money would just go to FOSS instead of large well known companies, but the money would still go somewhere and development would happen somewhere.
Think of it this way. Billions of people use Windows. The OS itself is not free, and despite that it is ridiculed with trackers and adware for more profits. Operating system is a multi billion dollar industry. If everyone started using a free OS tomorrow that doesn’t even have ads, the OS industry just lost everything. Sure the dev cost for linux distros would rise because of new users but that’s it. For companies like MS, dev cost would only be a fraction of what they reap yearly, so that profit will get wiped out because people don’t pay for it anymore, not even with their data.
Another example is of Uber. Uber is another multi billion dollar company. Uber takes 30-50% commission on each ride. If everyone started using a FOSS alternative that just charged say 5% commission to just cover the dev and infra cost and reap no profits beyond that, the ride hailing industry just lost billions.
You’d be surprised how much of the tech industry even cares about FOSS. Many are just there for a paycheck and check out for the day, and have little to no personal opinion on how it should be.
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.
As we have seen from the social media companies over the decades, they are making billions of ads, so it goes without saying platform like lemmy does drive the economy, the problem is that it needs a way to cover its cost.
I have read that people in lemmy dont like ads, if lemmy (instance) is run for profit, it may cast shitstorm like misinformation, bad moderation and agendas bc of profits and capitalism. It’s a very good reason not to be for-profit, but it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to generate business if the profits could go to nobody.
We maybe able to sell ads, if the ads is run by the government and the profit doesn’t go to anyone but the government savings.
Lets say we forbid ads anyway just bc we hate. The government could still do the host of an instance and ideally makes goddamn clear that it only does moderation over the safety of the community(anti-spam) and illegal content, no agenda, no politics. Do so by raising taxes, or ideally sponsorship and donations. If we can do that, the inefficiency in Fediverse compare to a centralized platform is an non-issue, bc the state-run instance, as supported by the public, should be fast and stable. I mean, c’mon its just texts and images.
Lolol that’s absurdly optimistic and completely ignores commercial contributions. No licences hardly means less expensive.
