It’s pitched as a open source operation system, yet the snap store is closed source and vendor locked, one of the reasons some of us use Liniux is because we prefer open source (and there are rational justifications for that).
Hate is a strong word, but there is legitimate criticism, I also think the closed source nature of snap led to the fact that it has no volunteers and that eventually caused malware to appear on the snap store multiple time, it never happened on flathub as far as i know.
Today for beginner i think opensuse and linux mint are better.
Regarding debian having old packages , i use nix but it is fairly immature, flathub should also work.
“rc” means release candidate, meaning they think it is ready so they want to test it but they don’t know if it is ready, so nobody knows for sure but it won’t be long probably.
Before the Reddit exodus, I don’t remember many active servers besides Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad (there was Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ca but they both had like 3 posts a week). Hexbear wasn’t federated, and servers were mostly being desperately spun up in anticipation for a flood of users who would crash the network.
There were about 80 before the exodus (may 2023), compared to to 40 (may 2022) and 15 (may 2021), about double the servers every year which is good considering this is “word to mouth” growth, even older data shows a clear growth trend, my guess is that i and others didn’t really see them because they are some dude community, even today i think i will have a problem listing more then 5-10 lemmy servers.
That said, Torvalds continued, “Rust has not really shown itself as the next great big thing. But I think during next year, we’ll actually be starting to integrate drivers and some even major subsystems that are starting to use it actively. So it’s one of those things that is going to take years before it’s a big part of the kernel. But it’s certainly shaping up to be one of those.”
I don’t know about that, languages which are based on standards (c++ , javascript, c) seem to have much better enduring popularity, i don’t want to see rust becoming less and less popular which will lead to less available developers (like what is happening with ruby).
I think the number of servers is a interesting metric to look on, it correlates with users who are tech savy and are early adopters, before the exodus the number of servers was growing consistently , despite the number of users mostly staying the same, That was IMO an indication of the relative quality of lemmy at the time and indeed it seemed to got the most benefits from the exodus out of all the reddit alternatives.
compare that with peertube which shows consistent growth in the number of servers (see this month, and long term), I think what makes them better then lemmy currently is that they currently seem better at prioritizing feature development by using a dedicated site.
Also the total donations have declined in the last month (from €3962 to €3,771 today), So i think we should try to not get overconfident and work to secure the future of lemmy or some other open source reddit alternative.
Linking to the source code from the main page could be helpful , itcould attract more contributors, and show the project is open source, some people tend to prefer open source projects.
Having an optional login and some sort of karma system like wusoup.com could also help making sure the discussions are relatively high quality, and you will get less people just sexually harassing.
That might be useful if someone will want to learn if a particular project is not really open source, and raise awareness to the issue of open washing, if it will get enough links it might appear on search results raising even more awareness to the issue.
You could always start it, ask for positive feed back saying it will motivate you and validate that the efforts you are doing are useful, you could later abandon it and someone else might take it and continue to maintaining it.
Best you can do is accuse something of being open washing, or correct people by saying that it does not fit the OSI definition which is widely accepted (it’s based on debian guidelines) and the software is at best “partially open source”.
Having a github page with a list of problematic projects and licenses could be useful.
But the demand is high. There are lots of users, many in a corporate sense using my software to further progress their organization.
tbh there will always be demand for free work, these small libraries that people don’t support seem like free code to me that corporations can write themselves relatively easily.
There is a lot of challenges to this. And these are only the things I thought of. I’m sure in reality it’s even more complicated. That’s why I don’t think the moral reponsibility at the moment falls on these companies. There needs to be a system in place that handles the contributions from users and distributes them to projects and dependency projects.
There are plenty of options and case studies for how to do this, in particular tidelift (which was started by a legit open source contributor) is one option, people manage to raise money using open collective and offer incentive through patreon (vue.js is a good example).
No i am using lemmy.ml, there are still a few things that are better for power users, for example there is no support for multireddits despite it being the issue with the most “thumbs up” on the lemmy bug tracker, RES ability to not show comments that are “read” really helps with deep diving on a certain topic.
You mentioned it being easier then wlroots, but wayfire and phoc reportedly act as high level abstractions on top of wlroots that could be used to make it easier to create window managers (wayfire author explicitly mentioned it), Maybe it will be good to create a comparison with these projects? or even divert your future efforts to one of them?