this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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The problem with this approach is that the rest of world is not going to be waiting around for a handful of idealists. They are going to use what solves their problem. You can bet that at this moment there are at least a dozen junior VCs in Sand Hill Road looking for investment opportunities in something that be sold as the next reddit and are ready to use their PR machine to convince the masses that this new shiny app is "completely different", "revolutionary" and "learn the lessons from the failure of reddit". You and I may know this is total bullshit. However, when the alternative is just a handful of developers who bans those who come asking for features and act like they don't care about the majority of Joe Average, who do you think they will choose?
I get when people say that they want to work on something and they don't care that their pet project doesn't become big, and I wish we lived in a world where more people could simply work on their things on their own time. But I also understand that if we really want to fight against the Evil Corporations (tm), we need to beat them at their own game. That will involve doing all sorts of unpleasant things like "deal with customers (even the rude ones) by addressing their needs instead of telling them to fuck off" and "how to make enough money so that you can compete in the job market for the best talent instead of depending on Fred who is the only one working on a crucial feature, but needs some time off to study for his finals at Uni".
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.