Let’s state plainly: the title is false. I use lemmy; you’re using lemmy; the other commentators are using lemmy.

There’s a concept I’ve been mulling over for a while–and economists probably have a term for it of which I’m ignorant of–that is that free software fails in capitalist market economies. I expect that statement to create a knee-jerk reaction. The truth is free-software is everywhere and as computers become ever more embedded into our economies free-software’s presence will only grow exponentially. It’s often the foundation for computerised economies.

Free-software enthusiasts understand that its become endemic to the economy. However businesses and consumers still ignore it even when it might be prudent to select or fund free-software. To ignore it seems contradictory to a lot of ideals. A capitalist business should use free-software as the monetary cost is zero: it’s a free product. Revolutionary organisations should adopt free-software is it aligns with their ideologies. Yet we know they don’t. These actors are acting irrationally.

Free-software lacks something that is a prerequisite to participate in an economy: capital. It has no money to propagandise itself. To phrase it another way: it has no money to buy ads. Without ads it doesn’t exist to entities who do have capital.

In Australia Reddit brought ad-space inside shopping-centers. Commercial software has revenues from which a portion can be spent on advertising and its through this advertising that growth can occur. The reason why lemmy has a small user-base is because it has no revenue streams. It’s an economic sink.

If we were to imagine that the user-pool was to dramatically increase what would actually occur? I imagine many instances would be overwhelmed with traffic, knocking them offline. For those that remain a lot of traffic would be perceived as spam. There is no revenue stream that’s attached to that user-base. If there was you would–absolutely!–see lemmy’s user-base increase as there would be a profit incentive: more users would equate to more profit. The current reality is that more users equates to more debts.

The market for ‘internet-forums’ has already consolidated into the big-players we know of. Maybe someone could take lemmy’s code and usurp the established vendors. That behaviour is already underway now; it’s why we have a multitude of lemmy instances. Maybe the next titan of ‘internet-communities’ will be running a lemmy stack. Not all operators are hosting lemmy with ideology/charity being at the fore. Some site operators are asking themselves, “how can I monetise this?”

From my perspective the issue isn’t why people don’t use lemmy, it’s why is hosting so expensive? The prerequisites to self-hosting (whether it be for personal use or for an established group or organisation) are costly. One has to pay rent on a DNS, static-IP, hardware and data connections. These prerequisites are commercial in nature and are priced as if every buyer has a revenue stream from which these rents are payed from.

If an individual/group wants independence and decides to self-host they’re taking on these rents that have been priced at commercial rates. Those are the monetary hurdles. There’s an intellectual hurdle too: a group needs to have members that know how to administer and maintain servers. The prerequisites are rather burdensome. It should then not come as a surprise that a group of young people who play video-games with each other elect to have their community on discord, or whatever commercial-entity takes on the economic and intellectual burdens. These commercial entities hide the complex nature of computer systems and the economic relationships that exist. In exchange they’re chasing speculative profits. They have revenue coming in from which they can apportion to advertising and paid programmers. They have the incentives to grow.

In December 2018, Discord announced it had raised $150 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures, and Technology Opportunity Partners.

Lemmy is reactionary software. It pines for the day’s of webmaster superiority… Where a webmaster ruled a personal fiefdom and brought and sold other fiefdoms. Users should be able to host and maintain servers for themselves and their communities. Economic rents and knowledge-specialisation are high hurdles to overcome. If they are overcome they’ll find a wasteland where users have already been captured by existing market players—not only that! They’ll exist side-by-side commercial vendors that pay to have their software blasted from every ad outlet they can afford. The enthusiast or ideologue has sparse capital to attract new users away from their existing ‘digital-home’ whilst the current players have enormous war-chests and if non-economic forces somehow push new-users towards them (e.g. something ‘viral’) they have insufficient economic resources to accommodate them.

I would advocate for technology like GNUnet, i2p and hyphanet (GNUnet being my personal favorite). Software such as those abolish the major economic-rents that would otherwise be required for the ‘clearnet’. (DNS rents are unjustifiable and I would like to direct readers to the OpenNIC project.) However the intellectual burden is increased.

I would like to take a jab at the idea that Reddit (or whatever third-party is used) takes ownership of a community and their user-generated content. They certainly do, but the community leaders voluntarily gave it up. They also neglected their responsibilities. There’s no reason why users couldn’t have a local-mirror of their community even if it is hosted on a third-party platform. That would negate the reality of a third-party purge and therefore the ‘destruction’ of their community. These communities are irresponsible with irresponsible users. How does one make an irresponsible user responsible? I don’t think it can be done.

Well… were they correct? Did you graduate?