My proposal for scaling open source: don’t

I’ve had a number of conversations about what “we” in the “free software community” “need” to do to combat the growth in proprietary, user-hostile and customer-hostile business models like cloud user-generated content hosts, social media platforms, hosted payment platforms, videoconferencing services etc. Questions can often be summarised as “what can we do to get everyone off of Facebook groups”, “how do we get businesses to adopt Jitsi Meet instead of Teams” or “how do we convince everyone that Mattermost is better for community chat than Slack”.

My answer is “we don’t”, which is very different from “we do nothing about those things”. Scaled software platforms introduce all sorts of problems that are only caused by trying to operate the software at scale, and the reason the big Silicon Valley companies are that big is that they have to spend a load of resources just to tread water because they’ve made everything so complex for themselves.

This scale problem has two related effects: firstly the companies are hyper-concerned about “growth” because when you’ve got a billion users, your shareholders want to know where the next hundred million are coming from, not the next twenty. Secondly the companies are overly-focused on lowest common denominator solutions, because Jennifer Miggins from South Shields is a rounding error and anything that’s good enough for Scott Zablowski from Los Angeles will have to be good enough for her too, and the millions of people on the flight path between them.

Growth hacking and lowest common denominator experiences are their problems, so we should avoid making them our problems, too. We already have various tools for enabling growth: the freedom to use the software for any purpose being one of the most powerful. We can go the other way and provide deeply-specific experiences that solve a small collection of problems incredibly well for a small number of people. Then those people become super-committed fans because no other thing works as well for them as our thing, and they tell their small number of friends, who can not only use this great thing but have the freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does their computing as they wish—or to get someone to change it for them. Thus the snowball turns into an avalanche.

Each of these massive corporations with their non-free platforms that we’re trying to displace started as a small corporation solving a small problem for a small number of people. Facebook was internal to one university. Apple sold 500 computers to a single reseller. Google was a research project for one supervisor. This is a view of the world that’s been heavily skewed by the seemingly ready access to millions of dollars in venture capital for disruptive platforms, but many endeavours don’t have access to that capital and many that do don’t succeed. It is ludicrous to try and compete on the same terms without the same resources, so throw Marc Andreessen’s rulebook away and write a different one.

We get freedom to a billion people a handful at a time. That reddit-killing distributed self-hosted tool you’re building probably won’t kill reddit, sorry. Design for that one farmer’s cooperative in Skåne, and other farmers and other cooperatives will notice. Design for that one town government in Nordrhein-Westfalen, and other towns and other governments will notice. Design for that one biochemistry research group in Brasilia, and other biochemists and other researchers will notice. Make something personal for a dozen people, because that’s the one thing those massive vendors will never do and never even understand that they could do.