We all know about how Reddit closed-sourced back in 2017 and will be killing off third-party apps this July, what will Lemmy.ml do to avoid facing the same fate? Reddit started off like this (open, aiming for freedom) and it all went downhill from there.
The replies already here have touched on the most important factors and why they matter (it’s open source under AGPL and it’s decentralised, the core devs are ideologically anti-capitalist so they won’t go public or sell out to advertisers, the users are the primary stakeholders)
But they haven’t mentioned an issue with this question: we are a community. What could WE do to about becoming the next Reddit after a decade?
Most important? Get involved. Acknowledge that volunteering and donations are powerful! The best thing you can do is to help the devs, whether it be coding, translation, documentation, web design, or the many other things that help this place thrive. I see all these posts saying “Lemmy should make onboarding easier!” as if approximately two people are there to do all the work.
I’d say it’s a mindset of coming from sites where you don’t have the power and the only path for things to happen is complaining to the higher-ups. Being open source and community-driven are things new users need to understand. We may well be their first experience on a non-for-profit social media platform, where we don’t have a designated full-time tech-support team, or a professional dev team of dozens.
You’re completely right. Community involvement works wonders.
- dont try to be a “outrage” generation machine
- dont try to capitalize $$$$
- open discussion != arguing
@IverCoder I think Lemmy is different because what could you use the Reddit source code for? There wasn’t any federation so it makes perfectly sense that a website which only runs at one company will close source their code to avoid competition. With federation it’s different because the instances talk together so there is a difference between the protocol and the large instance. It’s like making email closed source. Doesn’t really make sense for such a protocol.
We, the users should make sure to stay on lemmy servers that use the open-source lemmy code. If other servers open up, who have closed source code, we should consider blocking them, at a minimum not support them by using their communities.
That will make sure that lemmy servers will keep using the open source code and thus will allow other people to spin up new servers.
I’m no expert, but my understanding of the AGPL license of Lemmy code is that any modification is legally required to display the modification’s source code prominently online. So if I’m not mistaken then they can’t close source the code, so long as the devs are willing to threaten legal action (like Mastodon vs. Truth Social)
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