Obviously we all want to avoid enshittified (aggressively monetized) software or at least get our money’s worth. I’m looking at self-hosting software right now and one I’m looking has a pricing page but only for cloud (no other paywalled features) and is open source. I tried looking up future plans and didn’t find much, so it doesn’t seem like it will enshittify. (not related) I had thought about switching to Omnivore for a long time but then they merged with ElevenLabs and the rest is history.

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    6 hours ago

    Android, Chromium.

    The problem is that:

    1. Google puts in more development power than anyone else. Any forks we’ve seen so far are only really soft forks, as in they only apply a few patches on top of what Google puts out, rather than taking the project in a new direction, because you’d be behind pretty quickly.
    2. These projects establish platforms that have shitty decisions baked in. For example, the Android dev tooling has Google ads/tracking as one of the built-in UI components, which is why even if you patch the OS, the apps will still be shitty. To actually change this stuff, you’d need a majority of users to switch to your fork and stay there for a few years.
    3. Partially, it’s only financially viable for Google to develop these projects, because they have those Android ads or benefit from a web with less tracking protection. This makes it extremely unlikely for any other organization to be able to splurge a similar amount of money, which brings us back to a fork just being unlikely.

    And so long as a fork is unlikely, Google can do shitfuckery quite similar to proprietary projects.

    • tabular@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 hour ago

      Small teams are unable to take web browsers far in another direction as browsers have recklessly grown to one of the largest and most complicated software. Browsers do not follow the “do one thing well” philosophy, to the extreme.

      Most functional parts of a browser (text reader, video player) are thankfully resistant to enshitification. That is if they are free (libre), permitting a fork.