wiki_me

wiki_me, 4 days ago

Following the links and searching around, I found this: Andrzej “vosen” Janik, the lead dev, says in his FAQ:

There is a fork which seems more active (see 1 and 2)

It should probably at least be mentioned on the read me of the original project.

wiki_me, 5 days ago

Integrating with patreon or opencollective where one of the rewards is access to supporter only lemmy communities might be a good use case for a plugin system.

wiki_me, 5 days ago

I have been with multiple different communities that had GPL and other licensed code stolen for profit in proprietary programs. In all instances, the FSF, SFC and EFF were all contacted and nobody cared.

at least the SFC did some enforcing that worked, but i got the feeling these organisations are too “nice” , If the case is a slam dunk maybe it is possible to get a lawyer who will work by getting a large percentage of the earnings.

wiki_me, 15 days ago

Fundraising is skill, and it needs to be learnt, I have looked at a fairly large chunk of open source project that are successfully funded and i think that is what sets them apart.

I think it is important that users should have a very clear understanding of how you are doing, if you need X money to keep doing this, there should be a pop up saying you need X money on the software and it should be very hard to miss on the website and read me.

Will some people not like that? probably but you can’t please everyone and you shouldn’t let a vocal minority determines how things happen.

wiki_me, 14 days ago

At that point, you’ve become a business. So yeah, you need skill to fundraise.

or a non profit, and not surprising running a business or a non profit requires the skills to manage a business or a non profit, iirc the software freedom conservatory and maybe the SPI say the can help with fundraising, but you need to be modest and consider you might benefit from learning from other people.

Fuck the companies, they will always take and never give anything back. They won’t give you money anyways, so might as well shut them down.

That’s just factually wrong, for example most of the contribution to the linux kernel are from companies, blender development fund is a good case study for this (see how much each corporate sponsors pays)

wiki_me, 15 days ago

Calling it hate is an exaggeration , people are entitled to their opinion and informing other people by criticizing snap.

Another advantage not mentioned is that snap is a product of canonical (a for profit company talking about an IPO for years), flathub is managed by the gnome foundation (a US registered non profit, which should provide some legal protection).

wiki_me, 14 days ago

paradoxically just because an organisation is a non profit does not mean it does not sell anything, it means that the people who “own” it are not doing it for a profit (e.g. voting members, board members , that is what is suppose to be legally guaranteed ), for example the wikimedia foundation (the creator of wikipedias ) sells access to data, MIT university for example is also a non profit.

and i feel like the profit incentive might cause problems for the snap store, flathub warns when an app is closed source so it might be risky to use it, snap does not do that and maybe that is because that could hurt profits.

wiki_me, 17 days ago

My major problem has been the documentation of the project and how top contributors are unable to accept how bad it is. Discussions about improvements and attempts at improving it at regularly shut down or impeded. Coming back to the “harsh defense of perceived territory”, it distinctly feels like existing teams are supposed to be the only ones making changes to the things they own. Contributions from “outsiders” never exit nix review hell and are nitpicked to death.

I made a one time contribution to the nix docs, I also got the impression that managing documentation could be better but it did got accepted after a few changes.

With that said there are alternative projects that provide a form of documentation to nix.

wiki_me, 21 days ago

Yeah it’s probably not doing great, compare lemmy active user count to that of writefreely , it does a lot better, even the number of servers is increasing, the number of other projects starting that compete with lemmy (piefed, sublinks) is also not a great sign .

Not trying to belittle anyone, i just believe in the importance of negative feedback and defensive pessimism.

On a more positive note, the amount of donations lemmy receive (which i think should correlate with high quality usage of the platform) has increased moderately (see november 2 numbers when they started posting the numbers with current numbers) .

wiki_me, 19 days ago

As you can see from the graph support for measuring monthly active users was added fairly recently, so some servers might not be reporting it and in general 6m active users is a better metric, in that case that’s somewhere around 2.5 times bigger , pixelfed is around 63K 6M MAU and is also growing , two of these projects are comparable in size of use and manage to generate growth.

Sometimes it is better to look at trends and not the current market share, because that might be the result of historical circumstances that are not related to how a project or business is managed, for example writefreely already had a strong open source competitor (wordpress) and lemmy basically got a free marketing campaign due to reddit API fiasco.

wiki_me, 19 days ago

Look at the decline of lutris in term of revenue (around 2020), it seems to be inversely correlated with the growth of competitor like heroic game launcher and playnite.

What you mentioned is one possible scenario, but the negative one is that lemmy userbase will continue to decline and there will be less feedback/income/contributions to keep the project going, the resources spent on basic development on sublinks and piefed could be used to make lemmy even better and developing experimental addons and gathering feedback on this kind of experimentation (e.g. in the form of surveys).

I am also not sure we are at a point where starting to experiment is the best option as features that seem to have more of a consensus are not yet implemented (e.g. multireddits, the issue with the most “thumbs up” on github).

With that said lemmy did manage to overcome previous open source competitors, If i would have to estimate probabilities like in the good judgement project i would say there is a 40 percent chance lemmy would decline and a 60% chance it will maintain its resources or grow.

wiki_me, 16 days ago (edited 16 days ago)

Mastodon seems like a better comparison. It has more than a dozen forks and clones, and plenty of donation income.

Is mastodon a good case study?, his 6M active user count , server count, and income from patreon seems on the decline , and this isn’t a project that made a large dent in existing market share like wikipedia/firefox/blender, compared to twitter and facebook market share it is still less then 0.1 percent. and when compared to it lemmy is not as established with a income that is about enough for just one developer.

Sure it would be good to have more contributions in Lemmy, but as these projects are made by volunteers they will do what they are most interested in. Nothing we can do to change that. And if they add new features which prove useful, they can also be added to Lemmy.

Maybe, but i think the problem with lemmy is that feedback does not effect prioritization enough (that is the common criticism it seems, iirc one of the justifications for creating the new projects), peertube probably created ideas.peertube to prevent this problem, when i compare sublinks and piefed development statistics to lemmy (in term of contributions this month) it indicates they are already equivalent in term of development resources despite being much newer and not really usable. Better prioratization processes might encourage more people to contribute rather then go there own way.

I know planning and prioritizing is not a particularly appealing or enjoyable activity ,but 65% of businesses fail during the first 10 years , I imagine running a non profit competing with industry giants like meta and twitter and seasoned business men is going to be harder then managing the average business .

wiki_me, 23 days ago (edited 17 days ago)

Talk about a blast for the past.

Might be worth mentioning that that is a project that maintains the source code release of descent 1+2 .

steam , wikipedia.

wiki_me, 24 days ago (edited 24 days ago)

the distinction between big and small companies is artificial , a big company can still have a small product with low profit margins, and both big and small companies can be managed by the same mutual funds and pension funds (vanguard , blackrock, fidelity etc).

wiki_me, 28 days ago

Isn’t this a lawsuit waiting to happen?

wiki_me, 1 month ago

My country has non profits that lobby for citizens , I wonder if there is enough motivation in the community to set something like that for FOSS, I don’t think existing non profits (FSF, OSI) will want to deal with that kind of stuff .

wiki_me, 1 month ago

It’s missing a few features from RES, i opened issues about them , that should make using the platform a better experience. for example i would like to tag open source maintainers so i could prioritize helping them, or just people who contribute more to the community (that i can see i have given several upvotes to).

Also tbh some people here sound like russian or iranians propagandists or bots , if somebody writes something completely unreasonable (like making a terror group sound like the “good guys”) I would like to tag him so i could know which submissions to examine more carefully.

Also having something like a “superupvote” like in tildes.net where you can only give it once in a while (e.g. top post this hour/day/week/month/year/decade). Our information diet is very important, consuming content with great “mental nutrients” is a worthwhile goal.

wiki_me, 1 month ago

At least this prevents impersonation of well-known publishers or their software

how?

wiki_me, 1 month ago

verifying the submitter is a member of the project

That’s a different requirement as far as i can tell (When you do that you get the “plus” sign next to the name on the store).

the software name does not conflict with a well known name,…

It should conflict, the point is that some random dude can create a package and people could use it.

They can review and check that the URL in the manifest used to build or install the package is from upstream, but that can later be changed, it would be better to have some system where you need to whitelist URL’s i think.