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Chris Trottier

@breitensteinart One can make a living off free and open source. Many companies can do it. For example, the folks who make Nextcloud.

The bigger question I have is: how do these VCs plan on achieving their ROI?

@atomicpoet They might be still be under the impression that growth in user numbers = revenue in the future.

@atomicpoet @breitensteinart There are two ways to make money in social media: subscription/value add monetization or harvesting the shit out of user data (or both if you’re really evil).

The former isn’t as lucrative as the latter.

User data has long been a gold mine for startups because it’s pretty easy to sell to Google, Facebook, etc for correlation in an already enormous data lake.

Until moth.social says otherwise, I am assuming nefarious intentions.

As I've said elsewhere, there can be assumed to be only two kinds of Android apps on the Google Play Store.

One, those that are also on F-Droid. F-Droid requires everything to be #OpenSource, for F-Droid compiles all apps itself. You can't submit binary blobs to F-Droid, even if they're licensed under the GPL.

Two, everything else. Unless it explicitly says otherwise, everything else has to be taken as #ClosedSource. And non-free, closed-source apps are way more often than not ripe with libraries that "phone home" to Google and Facebook. With no user consent. With no chance to opt out other than by third-party means. Without even telling the user. In fact, even if an app is said to be open-source, that doesn't mean that the binary blob submitted to Google was built from the publicly-available sources.

iOS doesn't even have anything like F-Droid. And iOS puts obstacles in the way of providing open-source apps.
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla

@atomicpoet @breitensteinart
Except Nextcloud and other companies are selling support services in a B2B environment. Other than making white label purchaser-specific versions of Mastodon I don't see any source of profit for them other than the sale of data / including advertising.