I mean, the real answer is that most open source developers aren’t here for freedom at any cost. They’re here like a startup… Waiting to be acquired for big bucks. Open source doesn’t pay bills, and if a megacorp pulls up in a Brinks truck full of cash, I wouldn’t be surprised if 80% of open source projects sell

I don’t know why everyone is so upset about the NDA thing… It’s such a standard business practice. Whenever I (a mid tier infra engineer at a mid sized software company) needed to talk to a vendor, get a product demo/consultation, get support on a licensed application, etc… We either sent an NDA to that company or bad one on file already with them. Nobody discusses internal processes, policies or roadmaps with an outside contact without an NDA first. It’s literally just a standard business practice.

It could be nefarious, since it’s meta afterall, but I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s thousands of people/companies who have standing NDAs with meta just so they could come on campus and demo their product to some team

Oh I’m not saying what your doing over at programming.dev is wrong or insufficient… Honestly I don’t know what your doing to ensure the lemmy server exists long term (though its great to hear you’ve got some policies in place already).

I’m more thinking the rust community should evaluate options and vote, or some rust subgroup of the leadership should set criteria to ensure that another reddit-type event doesn’t happen again (the home of this community must be open-source, with data backups publicly available, with a governing body and a line of succession or something, etc).

If programming.dev meets those things today, I’d say sure lets move there. I think its better to have a lemmy instance for a concept (computer science) than a specific topic (rust), but that’s just me

That’s my issue. Loads of very niche subreddits that are the opposite of technical (gardening and plants and stuff). So the users will never switch… It took 5+ years to build those communities up in the first place.

But I popped back in to check today, and they’re all back open and the users are terrible, just ranting against the blackout and licking reddits boot like crazy. So it makes me sad to lose those communities and all that information, but if thats the quality of the userbase… I can’t bring myself to go back.

You’d think there’d be overlap between organic gardening, or NoLawns, or homesteading that would click with the federated, less capitalistic Lemmy… But nope.

The downside to individual servers, and micro-communities, is the cost and maintenance of lemmy instance. Its more scalable, reliable and cheaper to have a bunch of relatively low-churn communities exist on one bigger instance.

The upside is that the rust community gets to own its own data. If programming.dev decides to shut down tomorrow, and posts and comments made there are gone. Lemmy doesn’t mirror or cache… all that data lives solely on the server ran by somebody.

I’d vote lemmyrs at least for now until a governance and stability model is figured out to ensure these conversations don’t go into /dev/null like /r/rust (sort of) did.

If say the Linux Foundation or a similarly large open source foundation (Apache, FSF, OSI, etc) decided to host a larger “open source” server, I’d consider moving there to improve discoverability and lessen the burden on the rust community itself