People say capitalism is efficient, yet Twitter has around 5,OOO employees while Mastodon was built pretty much single handedly by Eugene Rochko. Today, Mastodon provides a strictly superior user experience with only a handful of contributors.

Majority of effort at Twitter is directed towards things like ads and tracking that are actively harmful from user perspective. Meanwhile, the core functionality of the platform that benefits the users can be implemented with a small fraction of the effort.

Seems to me that capitalism is actually far more inefficient than open source development in practice.

  • SFloss (they/them)@lemmy.ml
    2·
    4 years ago

    It surprises me how many people in the open source community are libertarians when open source embodies so many traits of humans interactions under socialism. Not to mention the absurd amount those people criticize capitalist practices in software just like Twitter but never take it a step further.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      4 years ago

      Yeah I find it weird as well. I love to use open source as an example of how things can work outside capitalism. It shows that you don’t need profit as a motivator for people to participate and that effort can be organized organically from bottom up instead of needing a business owner to direct it. It’s a really great example of communism working in the wild.

      • zan@lemmy.ml
        0·
        4 years ago

        Its also a source of profound wealth transfer upwards. All of FAANG but moreso the web companies are built on foundations of a billion lines of non-AGPL code they could use for profit.