While I think shareholders can be a driving factor, I see it way more often with VC-funded companies. The “2.5x year over year” growth mantra that places like YCombinator stipulate have disastrous effects on small tech companies. Often, these startups have an incentive to keep taking additional funding rounds, which appears to tighten the grip the VC has over them.

Try growing the next Microsoft or Google or Amazon out of that model. I’m not convinced that it’s possible. At least if you bootstrap your own company, you don’t have the same binding obligations…even if it takes way longer to get to a place that’s self-sustaining.

Honestly, this really resonated with me. Running an open source project on its own can be hard, running a popular one that gets used by tons of people and companies, while giving free labor, is extremely hard. Acting as free tech support to a large company, for nothing in return, is ass. Full stop.

I’ve seen some people make the statement that “maintainers owe you nothing”, and I’ve seen people state that “your supporters owe you nothing.”

While I believe there’s nothing wrong in a person willingly running a project on their own terms, just as there’s nothing wrong with refusing donations and doing the work out of some kind of passion… there’s only so many hours in the day, and developers need to feed themselves and pay rent.

I think a lot of people would love to be able to work on open source full-time. I’d devote all of my energy and focus to it, if I could. But, that’s a reality only for a privileged few, and many of them still have to make compromises. The CEO and founder of Mastodon, for example, makes a pittance compared to what a corporate junior developer makes.

Sentry also did this by embracing the Business Source License. Technically, you can still get an MIT-licensed version, but it has to be more than two years old.

As a former employee that worked there during the days that Sentry really promoted itself being Open Source, it was disappointing to see. VC Funding and a growth obsession basically poisoned the well.

Thank you. ❤️ I know, and I’m doing my best. It’s just my first real experience of dealing with any of this as an adult, and I don’t think I’ve ugly cried harder in my life.

I’m about to fly East next week, to bury my grandfather. I think it will be good for me, but it hurts to let go of someone that so many of my happy memories stemmed from.

It’s also a horrifying thought to me that this is the logical conclusion of “growing old with someone”. One of you is going to go first, and it’s going to be the worst pain the other person has ever felt.

I’m a trainwreck right now.

My grandfather suddenly passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer, multiple strokes, and COVID. It was brutal, he was in so much pain for months. What really hurts is that he was a wonderful person, a source of great joy and insight, and most definitely the person who got me into computers at a young age. My youngest coherent memories are of him, and the loss is exceedingly painful.

My stepfather pointed a loaded gun at my autistic little brother and basically kicked him to the street. My little brother has had his fair share of problems with holding down any kind of job, and can barely take care of himself. He was kicked out of a shelter for a messy living space, and living out of a tent next to a YMCA.

My mom was living in fear for a while, as my stepdad increasingly became more paranoid and violent, to the point that she was no longer allowed to talk to us on the phone if he came home. She managed to give him the slip and take the kids with her to go take care of the grandfather on the other side of the country…but, she’s in for a messy divorce.

These three things have kind of converged, and a lot of it is starting to resolve finally, but it’s been a massive strain on my mental health and my marriage. I’m barely taking care of myself most of the time, and trying to live with anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation…and all of the fun side effects of trying to treat those things with therapy and medication.

I’m so tired. I’m barely eating. I have six months left in a maintenance squadron before I get out of the military, and all I want to do is scream.

Okay. I’m glad that the situation is looking better, and it’s probably more on the Ubuntu people than the Gnome people, but it’s still an incredibly shitty experience.

The one that really irks me now is that Nautilus in Ubuntu doesn’t show thumbnails for PNG images in the file selection dialog. It’s such an ass-backwards change that I’m legitimately shocked.

A few questions:

1. Why did you name it Lemmy?
2. What have some of the biggest challenges been in developing a Reddit-like community platform?
3. What’s a big feature you hope to implement someday?

God, that book sucked. I read it out of curiosity, but it was trash.

Just cross your arms, smile wryly, and comment on how pathetic the Interviewer’s pen is. Cheap material, runny ink, a grip that’s painful to hold. Wish him good luck in taking notes on subsequent interviews.

Then lean in, and say “But, you know? I’ve got a premium writing utensil. It’s crafted in the Netherlands by a Space Age engineering firm. It’s designed to fit comfortably between your fingers. And the Indian ink that runs through it glistens and glides smoothly through a specially crafted tip.”

Pull out a business card with absolutely beautiful handwriting on it. Just as he expresses surprise and interest, sigh and say “But… It’s really not for you. It’s really more of a thing for your boss, or your boss’s boss.”

Start getting up to leave, and wait for him to come running after you.

Honestly, I think the #1 problem to be concerned about right now is that there a lot of people self-hosting for the very first time, that maybe don’t really have much experience with hosting or moderation. It’s tough! There can be a lot of drama, random software failures, lost data, and disappointments that can happen. An instance can go under at random, at any time.

It sounds bad. In practice, the day-to-day can be fairly smooth sailing. A lot of people just kind of need the experience, need to make sure they’re not the one person moderating thousands of people on a serer. Making sure that moderation is a community effort, that the server has backups, and that there are channels for donations to support the instance - those things go a long way towards long-term stability.

Massive amounts of cross-posting / re-posting of the same memes over and over again for klout farming. It’s seriously awful on Reddit.