Daniel Supernault had a series of posts over the weekend promoting Loops, his TikTok-inspired app focused on short-form video, but open source and connecting to the fediverse. This one sentence stood out to me:
If it’s not open source, you’re not the user, you’re the product being sold.
I don’t agree with this. It’s like an extreme version of the classic “you’re the product” line about ad-based platforms.
I’ve noticed a trend in the fediverse of thinking there’s nothing except open source and VC-backed companies. But there is so much in between. I love small, bootstrapped companies that just charge a fair price to users without outside funding or ads.
Some of my favorite apps and services are like that. Acorn, MarsEdit, Nova, Feedbin, Day One. You can prefer open source, but there’s no way that I’m “the product being sold” by using Acorn.
Open source is great. All of the Micro.blog apps are open source. But for platforms, open APIs have always been more important to me than open source. Mastodon is open source yet has no way to import posts, so it’s not well suited as a place where you can own your content in the way a blog enables.
Bluesky’s approach with AT Protocol also enables new options for social web portability. It’s a fascinating paradox because while VC-funded, it is the most open large platform ever built, with an almost IndieWeb-inspired view of usernames and ownership.
The fediverse has been a great step forward for the web. It doesn’t need to be the final destination, in its current form. We can do more with identity and content ownership. Maybe one day we’ll see a blending of the technologies currently powering the social web.
Open source gives power to developers. An open platform gives power to everyone. The web needs business models that can sustain both.
