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1. Dzuk (dzuk@weirder.earth)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jan-2022 18:44:23 UTC Dzuk

   I fucking knew it. The company responsible for https://charm.sh (Charmbracelet, Inc.) is Venture Capital funded. Avoid like the plague.

   https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/charm-1814

   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jan-2022 18:44:23 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to
     @dzuk Oh. So that's how they could suddenly dump some cool and shiny tools into the world. So sad. Nice fedi people work there and I wish them well, but I thought this was their project, not a VC one. 😕
   • Dzuk (dzuk@weirder.earth)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jan-2022 18:52:21 UTC Dzuk

     in reply to

     VC is not a normal mode of investment. It's why so many internet services have a good few honeymoon years before becoming completely insufferable monsters. And if they fail to become insufferable, they collapse.

     It's a predatory mode of investment that makes suckers out of the general public and creates very unstable and unreliable services

     Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 likes this.
   • Dzuk (dzuk@weirder.earth)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jan-2022 18:52:22 UTC Dzuk

     in reply to

     Comradery has a pretty decent summary of why *anything* with Venture Capital involved is inherently untrustworthy

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     Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 repeated this.
   • Dzuk (dzuk@weirder.earth)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jan-2022 18:52:25 UTC Dzuk

     in reply to

     • charm.sh

     Charmbracelet Inc (who has a Mastodon, @charm btw fuck you) has VC funding because it's investors think Charm can commercialise and monopolise the CLI space. They can go to hell.

   • Dzuk (dzuk@weirder.earth)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jan-2022 18:52:25 UTC Dzuk

     in reply to

     Any commitment to Open Source Charm will have will be entirely secondary to what their investors want out of them, because that is essentially the law by which their business runs on that they decided on in advance. If they do not make good on those, they will cease to exist.

     VC exists to trap people, so their commitment to Open Source and any other kind of PR - is inherently also a trap.

   • Dzuk (dzuk@weirder.earth)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jan-2022 18:52:25 UTC Dzuk

     in reply to

     • charm.sh

     I also think if your instance cares about the fundamental freedom of people and technology (as tenuous an as loaded as that term can be), you should probably perform some moderation action on @charm because at the heart of their organisation, they are trying to run a (social, not financial) scam on technologists.

   • Dzuk (dzuk@weirder.earth)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jan-2022 18:52:25 UTC Dzuk

     in reply to

     And maybe the people at Charm are nice people and genuinely care about making the CLI nicer to use. That doesn't matter. They fucked that up as soon as they took VC money.

     They (knowingly or unknowingly) set the rules for their business, there's no going back now.

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   • Mx Wolfie 🐺 (wolfie@deadinsi.de)'s status on Monday, 31-Jan-2022 00:15:19 UTC Mx Wolfie 🐺

     in reply to

     @dzuk yeah I learnt that the hard way when a young and shiny social network I'd come to love shut down because the founder realised he'd made a huge mistake taking VC money due to what the investors expected from the platform and he decided the best idea was to get out asap and close the project

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   • JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 31-Jan-2022 00:15:45 UTC JP

     in reply to

     @dzuk i'm always interested in better messaging to help average non-tech people understand and avoid this situation they frequently find themselves trapped in:
     - highly useful service offered at low or no cost
     - one day the service starts getting markedly worse / starts to nickel-and-dime them
     - service was designed to lock them in / competitors have died off or were acquired
     the public "story" is always 100% honeymoon but as you say the presence of VC should be the story.

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   • Dzuk (dzuk@weirder.earth)'s status on Monday, 31-Jan-2022 15:13:57 UTC Dzuk

     in reply to

     I think a lot of people in open source circles say 'you can fork it' as a refrain without recognising that there's so much involved in such an undertaking, that just saying that is deeply simplistic.

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   • Dzuk (dzuk@weirder.earth)'s status on Monday, 31-Jan-2022 15:13:58 UTC Dzuk

     in reply to

     And I really do mean it about performing moderation actions on them.

     They are in their infancy, and I think we can all do our part to let it die instead of letting it turn into a monster that will become another predatory company that aims to be - by design - hard to avoid.

   • Dzuk (dzuk@weirder.earth)'s status on Monday, 31-Jan-2022 15:13:58 UTC Dzuk

     in reply to

     One more note - I think it's important to stress how making your software open for anyone to use and modify is inherently at odds with capitalism, especially the kind of hypercapitalism that VC encapsulates.

     At the end of the day, Charmbracelet, Inc's investors will want a shitload of profit from them, and being *that* profitable always necessitates creating some kind of financial gating or lock-in mechanism. They won't do it now, but they will in a few years once they've got you.

   • Dzuk (dzuk@weirder.earth)'s status on Monday, 31-Jan-2022 15:13:58 UTC Dzuk

     in reply to

     "They're MIT licensed so if they're bad you can just leave"

     VC funds would not have given Charm millions of US dollars if their business model involved "oh yeah, it'll be really easy for the vast majority of people to avoid our future monetisation channels".

   • Dzuk (dzuk@weirder.earth)'s status on Saturday, 05-Feb-2022 05:50:54 UTC Dzuk

     in reply to

     • makeworld

     @makeworld As I said in the thread, VCs arent a normal mode of investment - they are predicated on 1. creating monopolies, 2. luring a large base of users and then enclosing on them, 3. making extreme amounts of profit

     I highly doubt that they will make the kinds of returns and situations VC investors want by just making some completely avoidable service thats nice to have.

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   • makeworld (makeworld@sunbeam.city)'s status on Saturday, 05-Feb-2022 05:50:55 UTC makeworld

     in reply to

     @dzuk how would they be unavoidable though? I will be staying away from charm's hosted services, but I don't see the issue with using their libraries. The worst that could happen with those is that they'd go proprietary or add some bad feature. Which would suck, but I could just fork. The libraries are really nice and useful as it stands now.

     I expect they will make all their money for VCs from their (opensource) hosted backend services, which is no problem to me.