Comment by Lerc
16 days ago
I think the single most convincing feature that I would like in a conversation app is for there to essentially be two companies with a public benefit charter that said that they cannot have common ownership or management, yet provided the same paid service, developed a common product though open source and had an etremely easy migration between them.
Ideally migration should be easy enough that it would be easy enough to automate a mobious strip subscription where it seamlessly alternated between providers.
If that structure existed it would be nearly impossible for a single provider to enshittify. The sad fact is that no matter how many assurances (often sincerely delivered) have been made, we have all seen instances where buyouts, management changes, or just someone in control going nuts, have turned platforms sour.
Open source is great but as this thread shows, just being open source does not mean functional or maintained.
Nothing is certain in this world, but I don't think that means one should give up and just use megacorp software.
And Zulip is specifically designed by some very capable people to be resilient. While we can mess up future versions, but you can always run (forks of) the older version. And as discussed on our values page, we've worked very hard to make the code readable and maintainable. (Various professors use Zulip as a teaching codebase).
We've made a lot of investments in the goal of having keeping-the-lights-on work for Zulip to be doable with a couple excellent people working part-time. It's good for our ability to spend our limited time on improving the product. But it also means that it doesn't require a lot of people to care in order for Zulip to remain functional and maintained. And I certainly care quite a bit.
So while I'd certainly expect other maintainers to introduce a lot more regressions, especially if doing significant changes... If you like the product today, probably the option will exist to continue using roughly that for a long time.
So like git and GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket should have made GitHub enshittification impossible?
No, How git and GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket should have made git enshittification impossible.