BraveSirZaphod

It’s not that genuine passion and altruism isn’t acknowledged; the entire open source software world is a testament to that.

You asked for an explanation as to why Free modern hardware hasn’t been developed yet. The simple answer is that passion and altruism has not yet been a strong enough incentive to motivate anyone to do it. He’s not accusing you of being lazy or hypocritical. The reason why you haven’t done it yet is the exact same reason why anyone else who could do it also hasn’t done it yet. It’s very very hard, and passion doesn’t pay the bills or feed you. Limited to a hobby, it’s simply more work than most people could ever hope to achieve in their spare time.

It’s more complicated than sheer greed.

The fact of the matter is that actually producing any modern technology takes a massive amount of work, and up til this point, no one has gathered enough motivation and free time to do it all for any modern hardware just out of pure altruism. There’s a reason why companies have to pay hundreds of engineers a huge amount of money to get anything developed; those people are not going to do this incredibly difficult work just for fun and moral satisfaction. It’s easy to point the finger at corporate greed for some things being locked down, and to be clear, there’s plenty of valid criticism to go around, but it has to be at least considered that most of this stuff would never have been developed in the first place if it wasn’t for those same companies. Your average person is not going to assemble a motherboard from parts and schematics.

Wouldn’t anyone just be curious to figure out how stuff works?

To this point, quite frankly, no. Average people simply do not care about this very much. They want to just turn on their magic internet box, get their work done, play their games, consume their media, and move on without any further fuss. The fact of the matter is that most people have no clue what a BIOS is, could not care less if it was proprietary or not, and have zero interest in learning about flashing them or why they would ever want to do that.

I’m not saying that the terms can’t be more transparent, because they absolutely can be.

But if you have become aware of this practice and you continue to participate, you have de facto agreed to it. You can of course agree to the terms and continue to criticize them, but you don’t get to sign up for a soccer game and then claim that the rules against using your hands don’t actually apply to you. If you don’t want to face the consequences of how distributed services like this fundamentally work, don’t use them.

I mean, yes?

If you do not agree to the terms of a service, do not use the service. This is the case for essentially every system ever. You can go complain about it on Reddit or something if you like.

I quite liked it, personally.

I imagine saying that is going to be treated as an admission of heresy here though.

Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, will become public domain in literally 13 days.

This may be a cynical view, but even if that does happen, the core ActivityPub protocol will still be intact and at worst be relegated to a small community of tech nerds, which is to say, basically the status quo.

Facebook, and literally anyone else, can already get all your content.

It would take all of a second to scrape your user page. Obviously that wouldn’t grant your IP address or anything, but neither would federation.

It’s publicly sitting on the internet.

Meta also doesn’t need to federate in order to do that, since federation just accesses public data.

That’s completely normal for literally any new platform. You saw the same thing with Threads, down to the hordes of people proclaiming it dead after the initial wave of interest calmed down.

The consequence is that, for many niche interests, there simply aren’t enough people in the Fediverse to form a viable community about it.

Just to throw a random example that crossed my mind, /r/glassblowing has 32,000 members. There is no Lemmy community as far as I can find. I actually got some useful advice from /r/terrariums, with 180,000 members, when I made a terrarium a month ago. I don’t believe there’s an equivalent Lemmy community.

Reddit’s massive strength is that it’s big enough that essentially any interest or topic, no matter how small, has enough people into it that they can form a productive community. That size also means that the default communities become absolute dogshit, but it’s easy enough to ignore them.

Kbin is a bit saner on average, in my experience.

The writers almost certainly do get a cut. Musixmatch does not own the copyright to any of the lyrics, and as such, negotiated with the copyright holders in order to be allowed to store, display, and sell access to the lyrics. This almost certainly involved some amount of money changing hands.

Spotify is paying money for access to the lyrics and using that as a feature in their product. A chunk of that money is almost certainly going back to the actual writers.

For the median American that works full-time, who earns around $56,000, the cost of Spotify is 0.2% of their income.

Obviously everyone is in their own financial situation and for some people that will still be a burden. But for sake of comparison, in 1989, the average cost of cable TV was $18, and that’s of course in 1989 dollars. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that $11 for unlimited access to basically all music at any time is a pretty good value for the money.

That said, if it is still onerous to someone, they’re obviously not in ideal circumstances and I’m really not gonna fault them for just pirating.

Spotify is not profitable right now; their current revenue doesn’t come anywhere close to covering their costs. The only reason they’re able to survive is investors holding on to the belief that, some day, it’ll be possible to actually make the numbers work.

I don’t get why anyone would use the free tier - not being able to choose songs would actually drive me insane, let alone the ads - but $11 monthly for essentially all the music anyone could ever want, plus solid playlists and recommendations, is a perfectly good value for me. Admittedly, I listen to music all the time and it’s a pretty big part of my life, so it’s an easy sell.

I guess the free tier is still an improvement over radio, but regardless, producing and distributing music has costs, and I’m more than happy to pay for it. Given that Spotify isn’t even profitable, having lost about a billion dollars last year, I’m not sure how long this situation will last, but for the time being, I really don’t mind it.