I’m so tired of the capitalist argument that an open source project cannot be successful because it’s based on nonprofit or donations instead of vc funding and corporates.
Some people seem to actually believe in this narrative that Linux, Mozilla products and the Internet itself are all alive solely because of for-profit industries while forgetting that the actual people, inventors, universities and organisations do exist in this world. Also the contributing factors by companies do not nullify the brilliance of the original project. FFS, it is not all because of the money.
@rolle
I am not sure I would include Linux in it, given that kernel work is really a lot of corporate work.
#OpenCV I consider a better example. A lot of academia goes into it and helps to foster a full ecosystem that is dependend on it. Yes, there are plenty of sponsors like Intel, but in its core it has been driven by academics for a long time.
And there are plenty of other ubiquous libraries. Maybe even products like #QGIS #openssl sadly is too, being neglected by funding for too long.
@rolle Humans have been collaborating and organising to make and do stuff since far before capitalism, money, or even civilisation was invented. They all kind of get in the way of so much stuff that could be invented but gets pushed aside because it's not profitable enough
Some people say they don't want to join the Fediverse or Mastodon, because they think the UI sucks. As a front end developer, a designer-kind of a person who creates user interfaces, I agree. Most of the web clients on the Fedi are horrendous, even Mastodon by default. There's lots of room for improvement.
We should really focus on how to make it more pleasing to the eye, more modern and more pleasant. This should not be a nerd network, just for geeks to geek out. This is not IRC or BBS.
As long as Mastodon for instance looks like it's designed by a back end engineer, contains font-awesome icons, looks like 2010, and stuff like that, being open and free is not good reason enough for many. I'm not bashing it, Mastodon is not the worst out there, in fact in my honest opinion Mastodon user experience is far better than Akkoma or Calckey for example. It's also more accessible than many modern UIs, for example my visual impaired wife prefers the Vanilla Mastodon UI over my #BirdUI modifications, she has some small tiny improvements of her own like distinguishing the colors in the action buttons as they have no proper contrast in any of the default themes. But that's it. She likes it as it is. So it cannot be that bad. However, it could be better overall.
#OpenSource doesn't mean the product should look like it's created in a basement by a math teacher. For some people Mastodon UX is sufficient (it even is for me, I like it enough and it doesn't prevent me from using it), but it should be WORLD CLASS. I don't say the answer is #MastodonBirdUI but it should be something much more modern and minimal than the current default UI. Pixelfed's developer is a designer oriented, Pixelfed is indeed an example of an awesome Fediverse app experience throughout the web and apps. That is how it should be.