I think capitalist ghoulishness dominates innovation at the moment. Because massive resources will always be ahead doing new things. But at some point - I hope - a fairly agreeable social network becomes a sort of ‘solved problem’. Perhaps some FOSS version becomes available that’s not cutting edge but gets the job done. It would lack the sophisticated needed to coerce people and milk their attention, but that’s not needed for our purposes.
The appeal in popular social networks isn’t innovation, it’s the sheer quantity of other users. You don’t need resources just to do new things, you need resources to build and maintain the infrastructure to serve all those users. That’s why FOSS social media will always be niche like Lemmy and mastodon.
I think capitalist ghoulishness dominates innovation at the moment. Because massive resources will always be ahead doing new things. But at some point - I hope - a fairly agreeable social network becomes a sort of ‘solved problem’. Perhaps some FOSS version becomes available that’s not cutting edge but gets the job done. It would lack the sophisticated needed to coerce people and milk their attention, but that’s not needed for our purposes.
The appeal in popular social networks isn’t innovation, it’s the sheer quantity of other users. You don’t need resources just to do new things, you need resources to build and maintain the infrastructure to serve all those users. That’s why FOSS social media will always be niche like Lemmy and mastodon.