If Facebook and Reddit and Twitter are all going downhill, what leads people to believe that websites like Mastadon or Lemmy won’t go the same way eventually?
If Facebook and Reddit and Twitter are all going downhill, what leads people to believe that websites like Mastadon or Lemmy won’t go the same way eventually?
This isn’t a business. All these instances are hosted by volunteers and nobody is accountable to any shareholders.
If that’s the case then what does Eugen Rochko do? Or is it like Linux where Linus Torvalds works on Linux every day but doesn’t actually own or control things that are based on Linux (such as Android)?
Mastodon and others are FOSS, yes. People either volunteer their hours or are paid by an interested party/company to work on FOSS projects, but in both cases they release their work for free to everyone. Even if they start corrupting their codebase to appease corporate sponsors, the community can fork the project and keep it going without the original developers’ influence. E.g. it doesn’t matter if Eugen gets a railroad spike through the head and decides that putting ads on Mastodon is a good idea, we will fork the project and continue on without them.
This makes sense - Thank you so much!