We all know about how Reddit closed-sourced back in 2017 and will be killing off third-party apps this July, what will Lemmy.ml do to avoid facing the same fate? Reddit started off like this (open, aiming for freedom) and it all went downhill from there.
It seems like the main driving factor in Reddit’s downfall is simple: money. They are making decisions that we the users hate because they think it’ll make them look more attractive to investors when they go public later this year.
Personally, I think Lemmy just has to avoid corporate greed, bending the knee to advertisers, and not allowing extremists on its platform (or at least forcing them to their own instance that can be de-federated). The first two shouldn’t be an issue for Lemmy as long as it is able to stay funded by users. The third seems like a constant struggle for every platform nowadays.
This is how it always goes. Hate saying always, but I can’t think of one instance where a public company made a move to improve something for their customers out of the goodness of their heart. It’s always about the money.
The whole situation doesn’t really make sense to me anyways. It’s not like Reddit isn’t currently pulling in a bunch of revenue. They also have been a private company since what, 2005? I know the answer for going public is “more money” but I’m like you I can’t think of an instance where a public company has done something for the good of its users.
It really does seem like open source user owned systems are the way of the future. We’ve been burned too many times by corporations at this point. Here’s hoping we don’t have to rely on ads and sponsors to keep the fediverse running.
The thing is, who a company’s “users” or customers are and what their product is fundamentally changes when they go public.
For Reddit, their customers have been advertisers, and their community members have been their users. Their product has been user eyeballs they can sell to advertisers. And prior to adopting ads, their product was an open community forum and content aggregator, and their customers and users were the community members.
After going public, however, their customers will be shareholders, and their product will be share value. This fundamentally changes how a business operates, and what it sees its purpose as.