Selfhosted

Those donations cannot be used for Firefox development due to the structure of Mozilla.

At this point the web is about as complex as an operating system in terms of complexity. That needs really strong specific standards in order for it to work, and in turn projects like web browsers are huge and complex.

If someone wanted to build a web browser that only followed the simpler parts of the specifications, it wouldn't work for many websites* and people would not use that browser.

*Whether or not sites need to be so complex is another question entirely, but the reality right now is that they are

I'm not sure if this qualifies exactly but the FOSS 3D package Blender has been surviving for quite some time. They're in Amsterdam, not silicon valley, but they seem to do really well off primarily donations and funding from some big companies.

The bottom line is, they started something that's bigger than them, and created more than enough tools to fork from them if they become a problem.

I always like to point to Emby/Jellyfin as a perfect example of how this is supposed to work. They created something excellent, the community joined in, and it got popular. Then the maintainers decided to try and cash in, and the community immediately responded by forking into what would become Jellyfin. And nowadays, the discussion is between Plex vs Jellyfin, you rarely ever hear people talk about Emby anymore.

After a certain point of user adoption, FOSS (and copy-left) software should be able to stand on it's own without the creator's direct involvement. The community can take the wheel if necessary. The Lemmy devs have provided enough tools to do exactly that, and I believe there are more than enough experienced devs in this community that we would not struggle to find the necessary talent.

That's doesn't mean there isn't still a risk, though. This is social media, the technology is only half the story. The other half is getting people to move. I don't think I need to explain to anyone here how hard it is to get an entrenched user base to abandon a platform whose mainteners have gone off the rails.

This is the first I've heard of "a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues" and "Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute".

Can you give a summary or examples? I'm not trying to argue, but would just like to know more. I don't follow Lemmy development more closely than reading the dev summaries they post, so wasn't aware of any of this.

I dont know much about the primary developers of Lemmy, but from what I can tell this is a part time labor of love project for them. Its unreasonable to ask people to push beyond their boundaries or capacity so that their pet project can become a 1:1 replacement for an incredibly mature platform like Reddit overnight

Well that or use an instance that isn't theirs, or doesn't even federate with theirs, or simply block theirs.🤔 I mean this is really throwing the baby out with the bath water.

I have no strong love for leninists/stalinists, and think they accomplish little other than making actual socialists look bad while not being socialist themselves. But I'm not that put off by them. They're generally fairly intellectually weak, and easy to maneuver around. Should you choose to interact with them.

Kbin is not a good Lemmy replacement.

I'm not sure if Mozilla is the one for that job, they have their own issues with community relations. I wish they didn't because the world needs Firefox.