If they go close source, other people will take the last version of the code and build on it
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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Did anyone do that with reddit? It used to be open source too.
I know of https://github.com/CrystalVulpine/saidit. Unfortunately the site (saidit.net) is full of right-wing/conspiracy bullshit, at least last I checked.
Oh that reminds me, Voat happened. It wasn't a code fork but a clone, and it was also filled with right-wing garbage.
Tildes is still around too, but I think it's got even less traction than lemmy.
I assumed thats what old.reddit was. But idk
Old reddit was just the old UI. IMO, old UI was way better than new UI.
The reddit open source stuff was only a portion of the website and algorithm. I believe Voat and a few others might have glanced at that code. Last I looked it was still up on GitHub. https://github.com/reddit
I'm assumimg the same didn't happen with reddit bc it was not federated. That right?
They can't, at least not while complying with Lemmy's AGPL license.
The original creators can sure try, but since Lemmy is ACTUALLY open source, the community can just fork the source, call it "the-good-lemmy" or whatever, and devote our time & resources to it instead of using the bullshit version
No. The API debacle was fundamentally about money, after all. In the very unlikely event someone does something similarly one-sided and stupid with a fediverse offering, people will simply fork it or move to different ActivityPub compliant software. Neither is possible on Reddit, a proprietary, for-profit website.
Actually... Reddit was open source until 2017.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
But the rest of your comment still stands.
I stand (partly) corrected, then. Apparently not all of it was (and it stopped being so long before it would've been relevant), but still, didn't even know that.
Our values are completely different from big tech. We would never do this.
As other people mentioned, it'd be impossible even if we wanted to, because people would likely fork the code.
decentralisation
It's not truly decentralized, it's federated. So if lemmy devs change things, each instance can choose whether to pull those in or continue with its current version, potentially defederating as necessary.
wdym it's not decentralised? do you mean the development is centralised?
I mean instances are not decentralized, they are federated. When I say "decentralized," I mean how BitTorrent is decentralized, as in there's no central server where everything happens. Lemmy is federated, which means there are multiple centralized instances that communicate with each other.
yeah I guess.
This was asked before, but it is under the AGPL (which means that if you modify the code you must make the modifications public), to make it a closed source project you would have to get the agreement of every contributor or rewrite it's code which is very hard to do (and i don't think i ever heard something like this happened). The federated aspect is another line of defense.
Didn't know bout needing everyone's permission