Obviously we all want to avoid enshittified (aggressively monetized) software or at least get our money’s worth. I’m looking at self-hosting software right now and one I’m looking has a pricing page but only for cloud (no other paywalled features) and is open source. I tried looking up future plans and didn’t find much, so it doesn’t seem like it will enshittify. (not related) I had thought about switching to Omnivore for a long time but then they merged with ElevenLabs and the rest is history.

  • SavvyWolfEnglish
    51·
    7 hours ago

    I like to see companies design their software such that their main financial incentives are tied to the quality of their product. This usually involves being open source; if someone can fork it, your paywalled version better have extra features that open source people can’t make easily. I also like to see them trying to avoid vendor lockin; if it’s easy for you to switch, then they need to actively work on not letting that happen.

    For example, Bluesky. They have an open protocol and (I think) you can easily transfer data between instances. If they start fucking people around, you can just jump to another ATProto app.

    For Kagi, the only thing you’re paying for is search… So if they fuck that up, you can just crawl back to DuckDuckGo.

    Obsidian is an interesting case. It’s not open source, but the files it works on are just markdown. If they go totally wild, I can just easily switch to VSCodium to edit my files.

    • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
      6·
      6 hours ago

      For example, Bluesky. They have an open protocol and (I think) you can easily transfer data between instances. If they start fucking people around, you can just jump to another ATProto app.

      I’ve never touched bluesky but everyone on Lemmy seems to be constantly saying that there are no other instances

      • Christian@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        2 hours ago

        There are, but as long as 98% of the userbase is all on the main instance the decentralization provides little protection from the whims of corporate.

      • SavvyWolfEnglish
        3·
        4 hours ago

        Nobody seems to be putting the effort into making ATProto federated apps, sadly. The main people who would do it are also the type to stubbornly stick with ActivityPub.

      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
        3·
        5 hours ago

        it’s basically the exact same thing as i’ve seen with IRC, people keep saying it’s decentralized and then when asked to show an example they just go “yeah well uhh obviously it’s not externally decentralized duhhh! It’s ✨internally decentralized✨” which just means they protocol makes horizontal scaling easy…