this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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I'd say "sort of." Lemmy as a software is under a classic benevolent dictator situation. It's open source but as long as the lead devs remain two people we are kind of at their whim. Yeah someone could fork it but it's the same issue of you're now at the whim of that person keeping their fork up to date and what they want to do. Until they kind of allow more people having a say on the main repo it's up in the air what happens truly.
We've seen this same situation with Emby to Jellyfin. Where the open source project gets so good it goes close source, becomes a company and leaves everyone scrambling to get people to help work on the last bit of open source code. Meanwhile Emby just used their huge install base to upsell people. Jellyfin is still trying to get full parity with Emby despite Jellyfin having thousands of contributors and being open source. It's hard to keep up with well funded innovation compared to volunteer work.
That's what the GPL is for: preserve freedom of the users.
To put a finer point on it, that's precisely why it's important for Free Software to be copyleft rather than merely permissively-licensed. (And for it to either have a trustworthy copyright holder, like the Free Software Foundation or similar non-profit, or to have too many copyright holders to make changing the license tractable.)
Exactly. They would have to rewrite all the code in order to make it proprietary. AGPL license ensures that not even an instance owner can (legally) change the code of their own instance without releasing the modified source code.
We need to make sure that any apps that are created for Lemmy, also have a Copyleft license. At the very least they should be Free Software (which doesn't seem to be guaranteed sadly, since most people don't know what that means).
"Created for Lemmy" isn't really a thing, all you need is to implement the ActivityPub protocol. Whether or not it has any relationship to Lemmy has no bearing on if it can talk to instances using Lemmy's implementation.
I see, but apps are already being created specifically for using Lemmy. Like Jerboa. So there must be a reason why people want to use them instead of using apps for Mastodon?
Mastodon mobile apps and Lemmy mobile apps are not compatible with each other afaik. The Lemmy API is different to the Mastodon API. Their communication protocol between instances is ActivityPub.
I think what the other guy meant was more along the lines of pointing out that there's no way to enforce that software interacting with Lemmy has to be copyleft.
Ah, yes, that wouldn't be possible.
I jumped ship from Emby to Jellyfin a long time ago. Just looked at their site now: "Purchase Emby Premiere and receive additional bonus features such as Cover Art, Mobile Sync, Cloud Sync, and free Android apps." Pretty sure you get all that in Jellyfin already.
Wow, I thought Emby was also open source. Why would anyone pay for and install Emby when Plex is around as the closed-source "standard"? You pick Jellyfin for FOSS, you pick Plex for "It just works" and because it's the known name in the scene. Why would you pick a non-FOSS Emby?
They were, then they started closing features behind paywalls which is why Jellyfin was forked from Emby.
There is no dictator. The developers don't have any control over people's instances. They have very little power. We are the ones that have all the power since Lemmy is decentralized and Free Software.
On Reddit the users have way less power, but more than they realize. They can't create their own instance of Reddit, but they can leave the platform entirely (and probably overwrite all their content with gibberish), which would probably kill the company.
I'd say it's still behest to the benevolent dictator but it's easier to switch to another if one goes bad. Lemmy.world is up to 150k users. It's a main instance now and Ruud is providing server space for us all to use. If he goes bad then someone else has to step up and provide server space for other instances to take up capacity.
Lemmy as a whole is at 150k, lemmy.world is at 33k right now, and is 3k behind lemmy.ml (though it seems lemmy.world has more active users).
So who is the dictator then? Ruud or the developers? :) We could call him a dictator of his own instance and it is certainly the most popular one right now.
I guess Reddit users don't want to leave their platform, because they are afraid of losing the content and the community. Most of them probably haven't seen that there is a good alternative yet. When we are using one Lemmy instance, we know that there are many alternatives, because we know that that's the whole point of Lemmy. So even if there is a big instance that has most of the users, it should be fine. It would be better if the users were more spread out though.
I'm trying out lemmy and enjoying it so far it feels more engaging (I was using baconreader and had a lot of smaller communities). I loved reddit for what it was and am pissed at corporate assholes ruining it for profits. Lemmy has made the internet feel a little bigger again.
I'd say each instance host is their own dictator, but there are so many hosts that you can always move to another if you dont like what theyre doing. It's not like you're stuck spending money to jump from one to a next and apps like Jerboa let you copy your instance accounts to eachother.
Maybe it's inevitable that every proprietary and centralized platform will end this way. They just keep getting worse. It's been exciting watching Mastodon grow and now Lemmy. We now have a chance to change something and become more independent from greedy corporations. We can have software and platforms that don't exploit us and where we, the users are the ones in control. People only need to want to make the switch. Then we can have a better Reddit here.
I didn't know Jerboa had a feature like that. That's awesome!
Feature wise it's more you attach multiple accounts and can sub on all of them to the same things. It's still a work in progress but they're adding features.
Benevolent dictator is a software development term, that's why it's italicized. It's not literal
Sure but anyone can implement something using the activityPub spec and federate with other instances regardless of what flavor they're using.
It might need something more like Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap with a 'foundation' nonprofit, a content policy, a dispute council, all the legal paperwork etc.
I think there's a good mechanism to keep that from happening given that you can always just spin up your own instance or join a different one and still be federated with every other instance of interest.
That current state of affairs (people having content on a multitude of instances) should keep that from happening, since a bad actor would need to capture sufficient content as to have the only instance worth visiting.
I can't foresee myself years from now having a problem making a new account on
some-new-lemmy.placein under 3 minutes and continuing on my merry way.Or at least that's how it seems to me.
honestly the internet should be nationalized its the only way to ensure fair competition