and many of them are bent towards developing internal garbage, or services that you just don't need if you're not hoping to create huge monoliths. or, as others have pointed out, making the same service over and over.
> How do you compete with that?
having different goals reduces the extent to which you're competing, and different goals leads to different (possibly easier to satisfy) constraints.
It turned out there were a greater number of devs NOT at HP... and today, there are more devs NOT at Facebook.
So which company would have the resources and reasons for contributing to an entirely open social network, with no way to monetize it?
Who says this won't happen as well to an open collaboration platform? Who says companies wouldn't benefit from it, or that they need to monetize it directly? Companies contributed to Linux because they got benefits by participating in the operating system. Open source works like that; adding to a common resource is beneficial for oneself and the community at the same time.
Similarly, an open platform like matrix.org can provide huge benefits for internal communication in a company; and making public the tweaks that you create internally is a great way to influence the direction of the software, as well as making it easier to integrate the improvements made by others. This is how Linux grew to what it is today, after all.
But we've had open source alternatives for many of these things for many years, and no company has gone to support any of them.
There's no company backing mastodon, and very little support for similar tools.
Of course it could happen. But it's not happening.
If a free software collaboration platform gains traction in the enterprise, it could be pushed as a safe alternative in the next data scandal, and maybe enough people could switch to it to become a viable public resource like Linux and Apache have been since the turn of the century. It's a plausible scenario, even if it's not guaranteed to happen soon.
So far open source communities haven't really tried to clone Facebook to the level of detail required to make people feel at home, and you're already competing against 'free'. So that avenue isn't available either.
I suspect it isn't possible to compete with Facebook because for most people it isn't broken.
How do you compete with that?
Do you seriously think Torvalds, Stallmann and a few dozen enthusiasts could maintain all of the Linux ecosystem?
That's the real rub for me. I mean, we imagine the ideal "decentrialized but user-friendly web". Like, there's an online open architecture of servers where you have a cryptographically-controlled "account" for your family and you can easily buy plug-ins to add features to this account. Like an app store but for webapps all linked to your private migrateable data store. And you can sync that data down to some kind of ubiquitous home box appliance as a local back-up/cache, or move it over to another host because it's an open architecture.
Presumably, if you wanted to enroll your family into a social network that's not based on selling you, you'd have to pay for it. So how much is a social network worth? I sure wouldn't pay $50/year for that program for my family.
The tools for the open web are present, just check https//indieweb.org
Comformist, lazy people, our own friends, are the problem. I'd love to see how to make them care.
We won't solve problems by shouting at each other.
I don't have lighter words, even if I consider them friends.
Moving on from grammar and culture (in my read, I wasn't offensive, merely stated a fact), what actual solutions, proposals, ideas, can you contribute?
They are lazy, that's the sad truth.
It's not that any of them are lazy. They simply have other priorities for what to do with their time, and other priorities for how a social network should work. To them, those alternatives don't provide the value that Facebook provides to them.
If you want to convince others to not use Facebook, I highly suggest you not fall into the trap of deciding that people who don't share your priorities are "lazy".
Most people don't care for that kind of environment. And so we splinter, and wall off. We're using technological restrictions as a substitute for cultural norms. And so, my original statement still stands - if you want to change the situations, change what your norms are, and influence global norms that way.
Google and Facebook have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Google and Facebook have tons of userdata for training ML models.
How do you compete with that?
The only way your projects would ever be able to outcompete Google and Facebook on technology is if you’d somehow get a ton of engineers willing to work for a good cause.
But that doesn’t happen. There’s not enough engineers that would volunteer their time for this. In fact, most engineers either don’t care at all about this stuff, or they drank the kool aid and believe Google and Facebook are doing good.
As long as there’s so many developers that want to work at Facebook, as long as Google has more resources than you, you won’t be able to outcompete them on technology.