I don’t understand why people think it’s necessary. Does Firefox display ads? Blender? GNU/Linux operating system? VLC video player?
No offense, but I think maybe you are so used to corporations trying to drain your money that you don’t notice how much amazing software we are using that was built for free. And this software is often better than the commercial competition (for example it took Microsoft 10-15 years to add workspaces to Windows and tabs to file explorer after they were added in GNU/Linux and it took them over 20 years to add a package manager).
Not only was that software made for free, but it also gives users freedom unlike (usually) the commercial alternatives.
Something that makes forums a bit different is that it costs the owners when people use the website.
Unlike Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc… A server host can’t just make the forum available, then set and forget it, they either have to pay a huge fee to some host like AWS, or have a huge stockpile of computers in their basement.
I don’t understand why people think it’s necessary. Does Firefox display ads? Blender? GNU/Linux operating system? VLC video player?
No offense, but I think maybe you are so used to corporations trying to drain your money that you don’t notice how much amazing software we are using that was built for free. And this software is often better than the commercial competition (for example it took Microsoft 10-15 years to add workspaces to Windows and tabs to file explorer after they were added in GNU/Linux and it took them over 20 years to add a package manager).
Not only was that software made for free, but it also gives users freedom unlike (usually) the commercial alternatives.
Something that makes forums a bit different is that it costs the owners when people use the website. Unlike Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc… A server host can’t just make the forum available, then set and forget it, they either have to pay a huge fee to some host like AWS, or have a huge stockpile of computers in their basement.
How do you think Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc, are distributed? Probably get more requests per day than any single Lemmy instance does.