• drapermache@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is what I like about Lemmy and the fediverse; Its not like some rich company or person could really take over Lemmy and then pull a twitter or a reddit. The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances and then creating terrible policies and/or mine all of the data collected in the Lemmy instance, but with Lemmy you could just move to another instance.

    Right now I feel like were in the same position when Linux started out - really cool in concept but with no clear way to monetize which causes doubts for its future. It wasn’t until RedHat really popularized the support for enterprises model that Linux really solidified its future; they found a way to monetize open source projects. Lemmy itself is very young and will need to have its RedHat moment, otherwise its doomed to fail – donations are nice but are never enough.

    As a side note to this - I find it funny that companies are super eager to replace people at the bottom with AI when in my mind it would be easier to replace a CEO with AI to ingest company data and make cost-cutting decisions, or to be able to look at the market and determine what a company should be doing in order to compete. CEO positions are the most expensive for a company so eliminating it with a machine would save investors TONS of money. It would never need meetings, just take in input of whats going on in the company and externally in its competing market.

    • Brickhead92@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      We’ll need someone to input that data, I guess we’ll need to create a new position for that.

      I shall be the CAIIO (chief AI input officer) and may salary will only be $150m.

      • OpenHammer6677@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Hey that’s a lot of work for one dude. I’ll be your associate. I shall be the ACAIIO and my salary is twice as much as yours because of the longer title

    • Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I disagree. The Free Software movement and the GNU/Linux operating system weren’t created for profit, but for user freedom. There is nothing wrong with making money in an ethical way (unlike what Reddit does), but that is not necessary for projects to survive and there are plenty of examples of this. Debian for example is a fully free operating system and it’s maintained entirely by volunteers for free.

      The Free Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Blender Foundation. They are all non-profits.

    • spiritedpause@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances

      It’s not quite the same, but Meta/Instagram is working on a Twitter competitor that will use ActivityPub and therefore is essentially one huge Fediverse instance that they’re launching.