I don’t honestly know. I use both paid and FOSS. They both have their place. What I do know as someone who exists in society is that everything has a cost to it, one way or another. For FOSS, that cost (in the form of time) is borne in theory by the entire community. In practice it’s usually borne by a few, and the majority benefit.

There is merit to code being totally open. It can foster security, creativity, and more. But I also feel strongly that there is merit to a dedicated, cohesive development team that is compensated for their work directly in a product in the form of a software being paid. I also understand when someone thinks they have something truly special and wants to prevent it from being diluted and so do not open source the code.

Again, I think both approaches have merit. What doesn’t (IMO) have merit in thinking that everything should just be free and no one pays for it. Someone is always paying for it in the end.

Same crap with people brigading Sync too. Like, I don’t get the mindset. I work for my money, I get to decide how to spend it. I’m happy to use some of that money to give to someone who is earning it by creating a product that I love using every single day. That’s not wrong, that is how things work. Everything can’t just be free, nothing would get made like that.

I’m in the same boat. I at least sort of “understand” it if that makes sense? Like, it’s not my bag but I know about it and that makes it easier to ignore.

But like…my wife is not at all a gamer. She goes to forums or reddit to follow hobby interests she has. Having a bunch of cringey leetspeak and gamer bro stuff is going to be off-putting to those types of people, and maybe enough to prevent them from adopting the platform at all.

It certainly factored into our decision to use slack for our college friends group instead of discord.

I hope not. I don’t understand when people suggest discord as a replacement for forums or things like reddit. It’s not really the same thing at all.

And that’s to say nothing of it being pretty targeted towards gamers and gamer culture. I am a gamer and don’t mind it but it’s a barrier to adoption for people who aren’t at all into that.

Slack kills me. A group of friends of mine from college use it to stayb in touch. Our instance has a dozen or so users, half of them mostly lurk to stay in the loop. For us active members it would definitely be worth paying 7.25/mo or whatever it is, but we don’t want to lock out the others who don’t really use it so often and they definitely wouldn’t pay for it (and some can’t really afford it).

I wish they had a tier below Pro for personal use (we aren’t a business) that gave full post history and limited everything else and was maybe not per user billing but instead usage based. It’s such a great, intuitive platform and works perfectly for our group of friends except that you can’t go back to look at anything.