Fediverse

None of what you wrote argues against what I wrote. I didn't say that open source projects can't be successful, I pointed out that they do not have the same structural incentives to continue or to keep changing to suit their users.

There also haven't been many open source consumer facing applications that have seen the success that backend and low level systems have. Largely because stuff like Linux / BSD / Bash / etc are built to serve specific functions with clear technical criteria that can be specified, met, and checked off a procurement list. Social networks and consumer facing applications on the other hand have to delight their users and keep them opening them up rather than any competitive distractions. That's not a clear technical problem that an engineer can crank away at and implement, that's an ongoing fuzzier problem that requires more stuff along the lines of continuous market research and product development.

And while yes, in some cases it's just purely popularity and passion that drive open source projects, in many many many ongoing open source projects it's in reality, corporations funding their development (directly or through employee eng time) because they've built some of their infrastructure on it and it's cheaper to pool infrastructure resources than try to build their own version.

It's a nice narrative that Reddit became Reddit just because it was this greatly built platform that served as the perfect forum for everything, but the reality is that during Reddit's growth face they did a ton of stuff to juice usage, like create fake comments and manipulate upvote downvote counts to make it seem like more people were engaging with your stuff, etc. And Reddit still exists as a competitor that is actively trying to take Lemmy's user base back. Don't get me wrong, I'm here because I prefer a transparent, non-engagement driven algorithm and am doing my part to contribute here and not on Reddit, but I'm also not blind to the structural headwinds that Lemmy / the wider fediverse will have to overcome.