Item — HN Reader

The solution is non profits or open protocols. Internet Archive. Let’s Encrypt. Signal. Peertube. Jitsi. AT Proto. (not an exhaustive list) Competition is not the way out, but building public goods through corporate entity structures that are protected from the usual capitalist forms of acquisition (B Corps are not required to maximize value, non profits can be made almost impossible to acquire through incorporation and governance choices).

In other words, don’t build another car company, build a mass transit system, build the library, build the park.

A great recent example was Mitchell pushing Ghostty into a non profit before using it as a component for a venture startup (Superlogical).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100329

> We will build on libghostty exactly as it was designed to be used: as a public building block for terminal applications. Superlogical will consume the same MIT-licensed components available to everyone else, and we will continue to upstream shared terminal work so every libghostty consumer can benefit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738228

(Our collective defense against people building moats to capture economic gains through the control of data or capabilities is to make it impossible to build the moat, and it’s never been cheaper to do so with LLMs, “computah make it so”)

3 comments

> The solution is non profits or open protocols.

This is a decent brain storming along those lines for social media in particular, but it could also apply more broadly, like you say:

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

I totally agree with this but it doesn't have to be a non-profit. Perfectly fine if you you build a for-profit company on top of open public standards.

Non-profits and open protocols dont do jack squat when capitalists surround those things. See: Mozilla Firefox and WHATWG

The latter particularly being membered by all the big corpos and introducing, controlling, and deprecating standards as they see fit and regardless of pushback from the public.

Governance is hard, the final OSI layer is always people, and the struggle is never ending. The primitives exist for those with hope and will to build.

Kinda hard to be cynical to the point of paralysis on a startup forum based around startups when 90% of startups fail, no? If the default is dead, strive to survive. I’m tired too, know when to rest, not to quit. The toolbox and pattern is straightforward for build mode. Don’t get mad, get sovereign.

Oh I’m supposed to get sovereign by building my own web browser and running my own standards committee or what? How does my sovereignty attract like minded people when half dont care and half dont understand?

Please clarify your message if it’s not from an LLM, I’m not sure what you’re suggesting or stating even.

Not a robot, but I feel my thoughts fall on deaf ears in your case. Godspeed (he wrote from Firefox, which is not perfect, but not a Big Tech product imho).

If you feel your thoughts fall on deaf ears then why did you reply in the first place? I feel your comments do not clarify anything you’re trying to say. I feel your comment doesn’t even address what I was talking about. I asked nicely that you clarify and your response is to tell me I’m ignoring you. Godspeed to you too if you have nothing to say.

It seems like he's saying to use open source software, and firefox is one of those options. Since it's open source, you "own" it soup to nuts, thus sovereign.

Except Firefox doesn’t qualify there because, as I’ve already expressed, it’s captured by Google (he wrote from Librewolf which is nearly perfect and gets the job done as better example than the other poster gave).

Your reply only acknowledges the last line and doesn’t explain any of the other poster’s thoughts either. What did they mean by any of the following where they discuss “building” and what does that have to do with using Firefox:

> the final OSI layer is always people, and the struggle is never ending. The primitives exist for those with hope and will to build.

> If the default is dead, strive to survive. I’m tired too, know when to rest, not to quit. The toolbox and pattern is straightforward for build mode.

This.

I think there’s a (fixable, if difficult) reason the FOSS world contributes such a small percentage of heavily-used end-user facing tools to our software landscape. We’ve got the commercial provided spanked on a lot of things, like web servers. Competitors almost stopped trying.

Marketing is a way smaller reason than many people imagine—it’s mostly usability. See the nearly immediate mastodon mass-exodus after getting millions of people to give it a shot. Yet most people that use signal probably don’t even know what open source means. Try to find a full-time professional photographer or designer that’s never tried Gimp, but immediately abandoned it. (The project is making a serious concerted effort to turn it around though! <3) But see how many professionals used Inkscape in their regular workflow. Even Blender, which is dramatically more complex than gimp, but after years of concerted effort, is a very useable application. Even with Autodesk doing their best to completely own 3D modeling, Blender is still an absolute juggernaut.

I think a lot of it comes down to who makes product decisions.

For open protocols, engineers with experience deploying things in real-world situations should obviously call the shots. We don’t need bean counters unilaterally deciding about things like Pocket integration, or shoving chatbot features into every crevice so they can look cool on LinkedIn.

But the people steering end-user-facing tool projects should be product people who are primarily interested in solving tangible real-world problems. Technical people often prioritize technical consistency or ease of implementation over usability, and incorrectly assume that nontechnical end users will be fine with it — they just need to RTFM Amiright? Technical people also tend to overestimate their ability to reason about design problems the same way that some designer might vibe code a few things, read a book about Python, think they’re basically a web developer, and then start saying confidently incorrect things about technical topics.

Alas, product managers and designers are not an easy fit into regular FOSS workflows. I’m sure someone with good organizational management skills could totally devise a FOSS project structure that would do the trick.