melvincarvalho on Nostr: I once started a thread on the freedombox list about replacing facebook. And some ...

I once started a thread on the freedombox list about replacing facebook. And some folks replied and said they wanted to do it. They raised a million dollars. Even zuckerberg donated! That's what became diaspora. We had a good plan of how to do it. But then silicon swooped in and made them use a crappy micro blogging stack so it never really was a facebook alternative. Moral of the story, is that when FOSS projects get funding, they are often co-opted and made uncompetitive. The whole thing open social web thing that made activitypub, again was co-opted by the open microblogging folks. But Twitter was always the smallest of the giants. The simple thesis is that open source is really good at cloning stuff and offering an alternative. We just have to do facebook. But in 20 years, no one has done that. A big percentage would use a FOSS alternative.