I’m not saying there aren’t downsides, just that it isn’t a totally crazy strategy.

Same. I write FOSS software in my free time and also paid.

You’re being sarcastic but even small fees immediately weed out a ton of cruft.

Federation isn’t opt-in though. It would be VERY easy to spin up a bunch of instances with millions or billions of fake communities and use them to DDOS a server’s search function.

Searching current active subscriptions helps mitigate that vector a little.

And often if you box yourself into an API before you start implementing, it comes out worse.

I always learn a lot about the problem space once I start coding, and use that knowledge to refine the API of my system as I work.

This reminded me of an old joke:

Two economists are walking down the street with their friend when they come across a fresh, streaming pile of dog shit. The first economist jokingly tells the other “I’ll give you a million dollars if you eat that pile of dog shit”. To his surprise, the second economist grabs it off the ground and eats it without hesitation. A deal is a deal so the first economist hands over a million dollars.

A few minutes later they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist, wanting to give his peer a taste of his own medicine, says he’ll give the first economist a million dollars if he eats it. The first economist agrees and does so, winning him a million dollars.

Their friend, rather confused, asks what the point of all this was, the first economist gave the second economist a million dollars, and then the second economist gave it right back. All they’ve accomplished is to eat two piles of shit.

The two economists look rather taken aback. “Well sure,” they say, “but we’ve grown the economy by two million dollars!”

Compiled Rust is fast.

Compiling Rust is slow.

Also my understanding is that RustAnalyzer has to compile all Rust macros so it can check them properly. That’s not something that a lot of static analysis tools do for things like C++ templates

That’s very subjective. I have yet to find a Linux desktop I like as much as MacOS, especially when it comes to WACOM drivers. The stylus response time/curve almost always feels wrong.

Also, I’ve worked with designers who can get something that looks and feels fully professional on a first pass, so it’s not just newness for Lemmy.

IMO FOSS has really great offerings when it comes to libraries or other highly technical code.

But something about either the community or incentive structure results in sub-par UI/UX. Obviously not a rule, but definitely a trend I’ve noticed.