No, not really. We've come a long way from ARPANET. Pretty much every large data network is privatized. The foundations working on funding FOSS might even get some of their money from Governments, but they are reasonably independent.
Anyway, my point is less about radical pro- or anti- government and more about asking "Cui bono?" if I suddenly heard about increased interest from any State Government to get more involved into specific FOSS projects.
You know that you are riffing on the theme of "The Cathedral and The Bazaar", right?
Anyway... For this to work well things needs to be enforced at the API level, but APIs are exactly that: a contract between two separate applications that need to interface with each other programmatically.
I for one wished that "the API" was not something ad-hoc and developed exclusively for Lemmy, but as long as "Lemmy's API" can be used as a de-facto standard for discussion-group applications on the Fediverse, then I don't mind working with it.
Effectively, they are putting the project above themselves.
No. They are working on something according to their own terms and their own value scales. They are giving a clear indication of what they are willing to do for the miser amount of money they are getting, and are telling quite clearly what they do not value highly enough to justify spending their time on it.
They would be sacrificing themselves only if they bent over and worked on something they already said they don't want just because other people see value in the work they already done and want them to keep pushing out the missing functionality.
This is going to sound shitty: just as the expectation is set that no one should make demands of work done for free, so too is the expectation that development work technically isn’t owed a single penny. Any donor can stop giving, for any reason, at any time.
It sounds shitty because it is shitty. The donation-based model is insufficient and unsustainable. What you are describing is the main reason that I'd rather shut down any of the communick instances over turning to "donation-based" access. At the same time, the reason that I have managed to keep things running (even if not profitable) is that by refusing to play this game I don't put myself in an unsustainable situation.
The surprising thing is to see how even people who have been involved in the space for so long continue to advocate for the donation-based model. Perhaps it would help everyone if we accepted reality and started telling people that it is not okay to push people to work for free? That donations are only a way to show support for what people are doing and do not entitled them to make demands of any kind? Thay if you want something done according to your exact preference and expectations you need to enter a proper contract where both parties agree to the terms?
This is why I was a bit frustrated with your last blog post. You acknowledge that there is a problem with FOSS development, but instead of trying to elaborate on a alternative model, it went down the route of victim-blaming the FOSS developers who you think should swallow the opportunity cost and keeping cranking out code. This is not healthy at all.
The links are on the first comment:
Glad you agree, and hope to see your name on the sponsors list and/or the communick signups. ;)
If you’re working full-time on a project, donations are your lifeblood.
This is where we fundamentally disagree. This is only true if the developers puts the project above themselves, which is the wrong attitude on multiple levels. Developer owe nothing to those donating, they owe nothing to the project and they should never be compelled to accept anything because other people are putting a metaphorical gun to their heads.
And like I said before, even successful projects are barely getting by with donations they are getting. Instead of putting themselves on some imaginary treadmill (one more feature, and we will get people to like us!) it is healthier for everyone if we dropped the pretense that "community is enough" and established beforehand what all parties want to get in order to get something done.
I assume you missed all the microservices hype cycle of 2015? The whole idea was to isolate the dev teams into their core functionalities and to only let them talk through specific APIs.
Speaking as someone with 20 years of software development experience and from the work on Fediverser: all I need from the Lemmy devs is in the API that already exists. None of the functionality related to content moderation and instance administration needs to be implemented in Rust and frankly trying to tie it with the core code would make development slower.
Can you trust me on this one? This is not about the Lemmy devs being dicks or not wanting to do this work, this is me saying that they are right when they say that someone else could take care of this instead.
receiving proceeds for your work is not the same thing as working for free.
Accepting donations is not the same as entering into a contract agreement where the person giving a few bucks per month entitles them to dictate how the work should be done. If people want to enter in a relationship where they get exactly what they want for the money they are giving, then they will be better off by going to a commercial provider, so that the nature of the transaction is explicit and mutually agreed.
About the grants: AFAIK they got the grant to make federation work, which was completed to everyone's satisfaction. If they had received a big grant from NLNet, got the money but didn't deliver on what they promised on the application, then you could argue that they did not hold their end of the bargain. But do you it's fair that because they got money from one part of the work that they should be responsible for all subsequent deliveries?
I'm really trying to understand where you are coming from with this. You mentioned your work on Diaspora, and I don't know how much you were involved on it, but I do feel that one of the things that doomed Diaspora was that the founders mistook the attention and money they got in 2010 as an indication that they were all alone responsible in "saving us from Facebook". If Ilya had learned to say "it's not my responsibility to build everything to win a fight against a multi-billion corporation", perhaps he would still be around.
you absolutely have to build in the tools and utilities
Why? If your argument were "users of the system need to have these type of tools ancillary utilities to be able to use the core product", I certainly agree. What I am failing to understand why do you think that this must be the responsibility of the developers of the core product.
What is so bad about the developers delegating this away?
I am not sure I'd be using any mass communication platform that is primarily developed and/or funded by any government.
But anyway, I really don't like to use hypotheticals as an excuse to not take action. Yes, it would be better if there was more public support for open source. But it doesn't. Should we just shrug our shoulders and do nothing on our own? Why give away our agency?
Instead of playing the blame game, let me see if I can help with a solution: I am fairly certain that I can take the "admin" functionality that I built for fediverser and use it as the basis for a "moderation dashboard". It's a Python/Django application that can communicate with the Lemmy server both through the API and the database. The advantages of it being a "sidecar system" instead of being built "into" the Lemmy code itself is that I am not blocked by any of the Lemmy developers and the existing instance owners do not need to wait for some fork to show up.
I can propose a deal: at the time of writing, there are ~200 people who upvoted this article. If I get 20 people (10% of the upvoters) to either sponsor me on Github or subscribe to my Europe-based, GDPR-subject suite of fediverse services, then I will dedicate 10 hours per week to solve all GDPR-related issues.
How does that sound? To me it sounds like a win-win-win situation: Instance admins get proper tooling, Lemmy devs get this out of their list of concerns and users get a more robust application for the fediverse.
There is such a method! Sign up to a paid-member only instance. $29/year gives you an account at Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix and Funkwhale.