Nah that title already holds NixOS

Maybe create a PR at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui ?

One way or the other, it’ll take time to be on par with the feature set of the good features of reddit (so everything before Steve Huffman got CEO if I remember right), especially in a federated way.

Also I don’t think it’s at least currently the goal to get the whole reddit userbase onto lemmy (apart from the obvious technical scaling issues that’ll arise). It was just an “unfortunate” consequence of reddits announcements that led to the sudden flush of a lot of reddit users onto lemmy. I think it needs (still) quite some time to get federation and the UX around it right (and I’m talking about basic features like user migration). Two people are just not enough, but few very passionate and idealistic/perfectionistic people will likely achieve quite a bit. Because of the announcement a lot of devs will likely contribute to the lemmy ecosystem (which is actively happening right now, if you’ll check the repos). Give it a little bit of time. I think a good maintained open source project can actually progress faster and with higher quality than most of the closed source alternatives (since I’m working in that area, a good example is Blender vs alternatives, which as of now has surpassed quite a few “competitors” with way fewer people developing it). You don’t need a lot of money for that (although obviously it would be better, let it just be for infrastructure cost).

Also github issues and PRs (or other similar platforms) actually reflect “addressing the needs” quite well. I myself have experienced it a few times and I’m seeing it in a few user-faced apps and repos a lot: I want one particular feature and it’s not implemented yet, so either I open an issue, describing my feature request well, or I start implementing it (if it’s either small, or a feature that’ll likely everyone wants), and often a lot of people want that feature too (visible e.g. via emojis), I think it’s even healthier than this layered view between corporations/operator and the user, as the user has to actively think through the feature, invest more (time) into it (even if it’s just opening a feature request issue). It’s not as easy as contacting the support, and complaining about things (which issues will likely not be communicated to devs the way it should be). Active collaboration is IMHO quite a good innovative driver.

Right, so basically this means that Lemmy (the company) will only be able to hire employees if they are single, young and in areas with low cost of living. Do you see the problem here?

Yeah but working on an open source anarchistic social media link aggregator, will likely result in exactly these people. I don’t see a big problem there, open source is dominated by different kind of people/developers. Compared to “cozy” corporate jobs, the quality of code, in my experience is much more relevant (“code is art”).

So it’s likely that a lot more idealists, who don’t value money that much will work on something like lemmy. And being able to not depend on a corporate job (and being payed for the project you’re caring about, also if it’s just enough to get around) is a dream for a lot of these people.

When you leave to employers to determine how much you “need”, you get exploited.

The unfortunate reality is, that unless you somehow “force” the user to pay for something, you’re likely get way less (money). Open source donators and donations are a fraction of the actual user base, so you have to balance the actual income (by donations) to those people who dedicate a good amount of development time…

I think he has a good point. I’m also more and more questioning my job, to the point that I reduced my my workload by 2.5x, to be able to focus on open source, although I’m now just earning enough to come around. But I’m learning much more, my skill has definitely increased in the last years in which I have focused on using the missing work time for developing open source. I’m having more fun with it: writing in the favorite language, actually relevant stuff, and if your open source contribution has actually a lot of feedback, and is (thankfully) used by a lot of people it certainly feels better than having finished a project in a corporate job. I think the QoL has certainly increased for me.

And I think these kind of people might be attracted to developing something like lemmy, and actually contributing something to society, the anarchistic thought of not being bound to these big centralized social media corporates (that produced quite a lot of bad press themselves the last few years…), and actually serve the community.