My proposal for scaling open source: don’t
I’ve had a number of conversations about what “we” in the “free software community” “need” to do to combat the growth in proprietary, user-hostile and customer-hostile business models like cloud user-generated content hosts, social media platforms, hosted payment platforms, videoconferencing services etc. Questions can often be summarised as “what can we do to get everyone off of Facebook groups”, “how do we get businesses to adopt Jitsi Meet instead of Teams” or “how do we convince everyone that Mattermost is better for community chat than Slack”.
My answer is “we don’t”, which is very different from “we do nothing about those things”. Scaled software platforms introduce all sorts of problems that are only caused by trying to operate the software at scale, and the reason the big Silicon Valley companies are that big is that they have to spend a load of resources just to tread water because they’ve made everything so complex for themselves.
This scale problem has two related effects: firstly the companies are hyper-concerned about “growth” because when you’ve got a billion users, your shareholders want to know where the next hundred million are coming from, not the next twenty. Secondly the companies are overly-focused on lowest common denominator solutions, because Jennifer Miggins from South Shields is a rounding error and anything that’s good enough for Scott Zablowski from Los Angeles will have to be good enough for her too, and the millions of people on the flight path between them.
