A big part of the issue is that there is a general assumption that the execs are making the companies MORE profitable, as opposed to the reality that they are trying to make them profitable at all.
Enshitification happens because things start awesome and free to attract users. Once there is enough base they start to change things such that they can eventually make money.
The only way to avoid this is to self fund and stop assuming Web apps are free.
It’s not like C-level folks aren’t cashing in well before their companies are profitable. They put on executive clothes and live executive lifestyles, either because it’s what they want or because it’s part of the theatre put on for investors.
I feel confident in the assumption that most users wouldn’t begrudge a company a modest profit off of the content they produce uncompensated on their sites. But it’s an unwritten social contract, and therefore ripe for abuse.
Some of it is born of users not realizing the value of what they give to the corporations— their data for mining, their engagement for attracting and maintaining even more users to the site. Some of it is born of the explicit contracts being written solely by one side(the execs).
The only way to about this is to self fund and stop assuming Web apps are free.
It’s possible to make web apps that are close to free, but that isn’t how developers work these days. Everybody has to use JavaScript, Kubernetes, Docker, and a 500-person developer/infrastructure team. When in reality, 99.999% of websites could be made without JavaScript, hosted on a single VPS with SQLite.
A couple of my side projects run on 1GB VPS that cost $10/month, and they would easily run on a 512MB VPS if those were still offered.
Yeah I’m hosting a video streaming service, a Discord clone, a CMS, git web, and my blog on a $120 ThinkCentre (4 cores, 8GB RAM, 1TB SAMSUNG SSD) in my home, and it works wonderfully. Basically no upkeep costs, the extra electricity used is not even noticeable.
Everybody has to use JavaScript, Kubernetes, Docker, and a 500-person developer/infrastructure team. When in reality, 99.999% of websites could be made without JavaScript, hosted on a single VPS with SQLite.
There are legit reasons to use k8s and docker even on a small project. It ensures that your dependencies are isolated from those of the host OS. Gone are the days where you have to worry about multiple different services clashing because they all want to use the same ports, directories etc by default or different versions of the same service.
I’m also done being called at 2AM in the morning because the security team decided to automatically update all servers and forgot we were on the exemption list. Now our install is broken and nobody remembers what the original configuration was. So we spend 8 hours in a “war room” trying to unscramble our eggs.
Docker makes everything infinitely more stable and it’s not that big of a deal to get running. It’s better than the old days of controlled chaos.
I don’t necessarily disagree. There are many ways to achieve the same or similar results. But docker seems to have become the popular option to the point where services are offering docker configurations out of the box. Meaning I have a standard, officially sanctioned way of doing what you described. Someone has already figured out how to properly containerize what to me is only a dependency and I can focus my efforts elsewhere. The option to get my hands dirty is still available, but it becomes a choice.
Yup, you can definitely take shortcuts that make development easier at the cost of maintenance being harder and more expensive. That’s exactly the problem I was describing.
I am thinking about hosting a single user instance in which I could have communities on a Raspberry Pi 4. Do you think it is doable? Asking because if not I’ll just get a VPS.
Yes, but you will need to put the database and static file storage on a USB or network storage device as opposed to the SD card. The networking is going to be the hard part.
I replaced the SD card with a 2TB SSD connected via USB, so that should probably work then.
The networking will indeed be confusing. I am already using the Pi to run a Nextcloud server, Jellyfin server, and a few other smaller applications. I imagine it is possible to also have a reverse proxy on the same machine?
Also the join-lemmy site and install docs keep giving me a 502 bad gateway so something in production must be wrong right now, I guess I’ll have to wait until tomorrow.
A big part of the issue is that there is a general assumption that the execs are making the companies MORE profitable, as opposed to the reality that they are trying to make them profitable at all.
Enshitification happens because things start awesome and free to attract users. Once there is enough base they start to change things such that they can eventually make money.
The only way to avoid this is to self fund and stop assuming Web apps are free.
It’s not like C-level folks aren’t cashing in well before their companies are profitable. They put on executive clothes and live executive lifestyles, either because it’s what they want or because it’s part of the theatre put on for investors.
I feel confident in the assumption that most users wouldn’t begrudge a company a modest profit off of the content they produce uncompensated on their sites. But it’s an unwritten social contract, and therefore ripe for abuse.
Some of it is born of users not realizing the value of what they give to the corporations— their data for mining, their engagement for attracting and maintaining even more users to the site. Some of it is born of the explicit contracts being written solely by one side(the execs).
Completely agree on all points. The idea of “modest” is not something that VC wants so unless you are grass roots there is no way it will fly
It’s possible to make web apps that are close to free, but that isn’t how developers work these days. Everybody has to use JavaScript, Kubernetes, Docker, and a 500-person developer/infrastructure team. When in reality, 99.999% of websites could be made without JavaScript, hosted on a single VPS with SQLite.
A couple of my side projects run on 1GB VPS that cost $10/month, and they would easily run on a 512MB VPS if those were still offered.
Yeah I’m hosting a video streaming service, a Discord clone, a CMS, git web, and my blog on a $120 ThinkCentre (4 cores, 8GB RAM, 1TB SAMSUNG SSD) in my home, and it works wonderfully. Basically no upkeep costs, the extra electricity used is not even noticeable.
There are legit reasons to use k8s and docker even on a small project. It ensures that your dependencies are isolated from those of the host OS. Gone are the days where you have to worry about multiple different services clashing because they all want to use the same ports, directories etc by default or different versions of the same service.
I’m also done being called at 2AM in the morning because the security team decided to automatically update all servers and forgot we were on the exemption list. Now our install is broken and nobody remembers what the original configuration was. So we spend 8 hours in a “war room” trying to unscramble our eggs.
Docker makes everything infinitely more stable and it’s not that big of a deal to get running. It’s better than the old days of controlled chaos.
None of those things require Docker or Kubernetes… You can use containers + cgroups without adding complexity on top.
I don’t necessarily disagree. There are many ways to achieve the same or similar results. But docker seems to have become the popular option to the point where services are offering docker configurations out of the box. Meaning I have a standard, officially sanctioned way of doing what you described. Someone has already figured out how to properly containerize what to me is only a dependency and I can focus my efforts elsewhere. The option to get my hands dirty is still available, but it becomes a choice.
Yup, you can definitely take shortcuts that make development easier at the cost of maintenance being harder and more expensive. That’s exactly the problem I was describing.
I am thinking about hosting a single user instance in which I could have communities on a Raspberry Pi 4. Do you think it is doable? Asking because if not I’ll just get a VPS.
Yes, but you will need to put the database and static file storage on a USB or network storage device as opposed to the SD card. The networking is going to be the hard part.
I replaced the SD card with a 2TB SSD connected via USB, so that should probably work then. The networking will indeed be confusing. I am already using the Pi to run a Nextcloud server, Jellyfin server, and a few other smaller applications. I imagine it is possible to also have a reverse proxy on the same machine? Also the join-lemmy site and install docs keep giving me a 502 bad gateway so something in production must be wrong right now, I guess I’ll have to wait until tomorrow.
Yeah, if you already have the routing and such set up for nextcloud/etc then it should be simple to add another reverse proxy to lemmy.
Re: the site being down, you can find the Markdown documentation here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/4249465e9960cad97245aa03b3ad4c758ff945c7/src/en/administration/administration.md
Awesome thank you!!!