Josh Simmons
TIL about another community on Slack who is now being asked to pay thousands to preserve basic functionality 😬
Proprietary tools that offer a lot for free, without fail, will squeeze you. And unfortunately, because of their nature, a lot gets left behind when you inevitably migrate.
When we select tools for our communities, we need to think over longer time horizons.
FOSS options like Matrix for chat and Discourse for forums are the better bet.
Josh Simmons
Let me be clear: FOSS needs and deserves our financial support.
But this isn't really about money.
It's about how fraught it is to build a commons and a community on the back of proprietary platforms which follow a predictable pattern: in which VC money is used to subsidize free or severely discounted services to disrupt a market and create a captive audience which they then squeeze.
The incentives are simply not aligned for good outcomes.
Aral Balkan
@miclgael @josh Or, alternatively, horrible multi-billion or trillion-dollar monopoly.
Michael Gale
@josh VC + thing + 10 years = no thing
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