Because running services at scale invariably becomes prohibitively expensive, and because the people willing and able to dedicate part of their lives building and maintaining large scale software projects are seldom willing to do so for free forever...
If you run a highly sucessful project, eventually the day will come when you come to a crossroad and you'll have to choose to either:
Keep on doing whatever it is your doing for free, eventually becoming a meme and an hero for the community (think Stallman, Linus Torvals)
Get your hard earned payday by selling off your project to whatever business interest comes knocking.
Thing is people grow older, their priorities change, and for most peoplethe older you get the more attractive the prospect of a big fat payday becomes.
I, for one, think more (if not most) projects should work on a non-profit/infrastructural basis and get their funding through donations, basically like wikipedia.
Just joined, and well, I'm thinking ill stay. Ive been looking for a good reddit alternative for a while now. devs, you've done quite some good work here.
Flashbacks to the first hour using reddit as an former digg user...
It's fine. If people want to switch they will do so.
What separates the smart from the stupid is not the ability to adapt to something new, it's the ability to overcome obstacles they may encounter when trying the new thing.
We are happy to see that many of you are exploring Lemmy after Reddit announced changes to its API policy. I maintain this project alongside @dessalines....
Lemmy looks great, I hope it manages to comes out on top on the upcomming battle of the reddit alternatives because due to it's decentralized nature it's pretty much impossible for lemmy to go south like reddit and digg.
IMO the one thing that should be possible to do on lemmy is for users from one server to be able to post and comment on another server within the lemmy network.
Posts and comment made by users from a different realm could be published as some variaton of "user@server", that way we could have multiple instances of "user" on the network, just on different servers.
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my thoughts on lemmy so far
Just joined, and well, I'm thinking ill stay. Ive been looking for a good reddit alternative for a while now. devs, you've done quite some good work here.
Welcome Reddit refugees!
We are happy to see that many of you are exploring Lemmy after Reddit announced changes to its API policy. I maintain this project alongside @dessalines....