Obviously we all want to avoid enshittified (aggressively monetized) software or at least get our money’s worth. I’m looking at self-hosting software right now and one I’m looking has a pricing page but only for cloud (no other paywalled features) and is open source. I tried looking up future plans and didn’t find much, so it doesn’t seem like it will enshittify. (not related) I had thought about switching to Omnivore for a long time but then they merged with ElevenLabs and the rest is history.

  • Swedneck
    3·
    4 hours ago

    I think i have 3 big criteria:

    • Track record
    • Structuring things to pre-emptively keep themselves (and more importantly, those who might take over later) honest and aligned with the collective good
    • Good people involved and ideally in charge of the project

    Other people have mentioned things like venture capital and that’s certainly something to bear in mind (arguably part of the structure), but there are projects like Matrix where that feels quite marginal to me, the aforementioned aspects more than make up for it.
    Like when the main figurehead of the project goes on stage and nerds out about the code, that’s a pretty fucking good sign in my book.