Well exactly. The VC projects get to accelerate their “right now” factor with money. Money that doesn’t need to make a return on investment for another x years. That means, before those products start their hostile monetization campaigns, they will be unequivocally the best in their field by any metric other than “libre as in freedom”.
Look at Twitter. Did people that jumped ship jump to the relatively mature but “fiddly” federated platforms, or did they jump to “it’s literally Twitter but without ads and grok” in Bluesky?
We’re on Lemmy, so we’re obviously in a group more willing to tolerate “it’s an open protocol with some weirdness but that’s better than being on one corporation’s server beholden to their rules and TOS”.
Anyone switching from Plex to Emby in 2026 instead of to Jellyfin chose Emby for a reason. For them, Emby is a “better” product and “still free” the way Plex was free for all meaningful features (hardware acceleration, remote streaming…) in 2018. Maybe it’ll never happen, maybe it’ll take until 2030, who knows, but Emby is in the exact same state that Plex was before Plex closed the source and started rent-seeking.
I mean…I’m on both of those, but I know I can use Bluesky as a linear feed like Mastodon, and as long as that still works with no algorithm, it solves my Twitter problem. I think the cycle of software innovation is that you have the first proprietary tool that solves a problem, like MS Office or 3DSMax, and then the most important parts of those programs are solved in open source software after a lag, like LibreOffice or Blender. Discord would always be replaced in time.
Well exactly. The VC projects get to accelerate their “right now” factor with money. Money that doesn’t need to make a return on investment for another x years. That means, before those products start their hostile monetization campaigns, they will be unequivocally the best in their field by any metric other than “libre as in freedom”.
Look at Twitter. Did people that jumped ship jump to the relatively mature but “fiddly” federated platforms, or did they jump to “it’s literally Twitter but without ads and grok” in Bluesky?
We’re on Lemmy, so we’re obviously in a group more willing to tolerate “it’s an open protocol with some weirdness but that’s better than being on one corporation’s server beholden to their rules and TOS”.
Anyone switching from Plex to Emby in 2026 instead of to Jellyfin chose Emby for a reason. For them, Emby is a “better” product and “still free” the way Plex was free for all meaningful features (hardware acceleration, remote streaming…) in 2018. Maybe it’ll never happen, maybe it’ll take until 2030, who knows, but Emby is in the exact same state that Plex was before Plex closed the source and started rent-seeking.
I mean…I’m on both of those, but I know I can use Bluesky as a linear feed like Mastodon, and as long as that still works with no algorithm, it solves my Twitter problem. I think the cycle of software innovation is that you have the first proprietary tool that solves a problem, like MS Office or 3DSMax, and then the most important parts of those programs are solved in open source software after a lag, like LibreOffice or Blender. Discord would always be replaced in time.