Rimu recently started a new rant thread. I copied the response of the person they had targeted and in less than a minute Rimu had deleted the comment.
This is the comment Rimu did not want people being able to see:
https://feddit.uk/post/53824748/26875911
This is the thread I shared it on:
https://feddit.uk/post/53824747
I feel this extends quite a bit to the entire design of the Fediverse/Threadiverse. We’re this network of interconnected places. We have communities. But to quite some degree, we use that to build specific places for our individual tribes. Be it pro-AI people, anti-AI people, online “anarchists”, tankies. There’s a lot of identity going in. We rarely have a “tech news” community. It’d be the tech news community on the tankie server, or the anti-zionist tech news, you’d better pay attention if the people in the comments like or dislike AI, because this isn’t about facts… Mingling with the people here is often connected with some kind of world view I have to subscribe to.
I don’t necessarily share the perspective on software itself, or volunteer work, though. I’ve done some volunteer work in my real-life community… I’ve been using Free Software for decades… And I believe a lot of that is just done because a lot of people have a good heart. Or whatever motivation, but I’ve regularly seen it come with no strings attached.
I mean, I’m not saying that all humans are completely self-interested. I think volunteering in your local community is often a great way to meet some excellent people. And local volunteering contains a lot of the feedback loops that will encourage normal, well adjusted people to participate - you are becoming part of a real social group, a group of friends, who are doing something positive that they can see the results of in their own lives.
And I think the pioneers in early free software had a lot of these same things going for them - they were part of a small, dedicated community, leaving their mark on the world.
But a lot of foss software has been written by people either in non-profits, or in for-profit organizations who finagled their way into getting paid for the work. Eg, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Docker were / are mostly written and maintained by people who are being paid for their work.
I think Red Hat probably shows the best way forward. Write the software as opensource, then sell hosting and support as a service.
And as part of the software they provide, they should also provide an ootb way to ask people for money. Essentially, you could have a fediverse instance that has moderation and (likely at least in the beginning) content creation/aggregation/curation as part of the service. The selling point being that the feed and comments are of so much higher quality that it is worth it to chip in $1/month or whatever to participate.