> corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps,

Anecdotally, I’ve had a lot of experiences like this with newer generations of people on topics like open source software or community projects: They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche, to believe that the only good fight is to actively harm corporations. Their idea of the world is a very clear black and white contrast with people on one side and corporations on the other.

Such a clean separation of the world only exists in ideas they get from social media and movies. Encountering a project like OSM or an open source project where the largest users (and for OSS, maybe the largest contributors) are people involved with corporations doesn’t fit into their worldview, so they file it in the “corporate” side of the divide and dislike it.

[delayed]

Many longtime OSM mappers like myself are acutely aware of various corporations making big bucks on the back of our volunteered time and effort. Often times without contributing anything. Recently made worse by horrible API abuses.

I get why people might not be motivated to join us in the tragedy of the commons.

The kids are alright (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Zeloof). They are putting up more of a fight than you can imagine. The root cause of centralization is the way we do hardware manufacturing (as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354). I think it will take about 5 years to make fabs into home appliances, then the entire stack will decentralize from the bottom up. The future is most likely solar/cypherpunk, at least in America.

I personally think most people become disengaged from the side of things like OSM because they literally don't have visibility to the problem. It becomes even worse when there are literally trillions of dollars of market value derives from the good work of open source, but people only see the badge of product and not all of the layers of onion beneath it.

I really wish the world recognized and provided tax income to these projects because they have been the backbone of our ever-complex technological society for probably about thirty years. Rather than what we have now where large corporations will take a foothold in an open-source project and hollow it out for parts then sell it as a "turnkey" product like we have seen time and time again.

You are correct about phone apps, but many of us still use desktop computer systems. I do, for instance. Most gamers also do.

It is, however had, true, that the interaction pattern changed. So many walled ghettos about nowadays - look at Facebook and Google (via youtube).

<tangent>

> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives

All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.

> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements

All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.

It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.

</tangent>

speaking of OSM... I've been part of teams at _certain country_'s _certain municipalities_ and teams working on GIS projects. so little among those people, who consume OSM content on a daily basis, even think about giving back, that even though I am not an OSM contributor, I start to get outraged at their total ignorance and disregard for crowd-sourced content, and the fact that someone put some work to have it there. same people are then getting royalties delivering this content to third parties. this is so wrong on so many levels, and I can't think of a way to make it work in a future where data is more precious than software packages.

OSM is still too difficult to contribute to for mass engagement. I spent an entire day trying to figure out how I could contribute fixes to the map for my corner of the country. There are 30 roads nearby with inaccuracies that would take me weeks to correct by hand. That could be fixed easily if there was a convenient app that recorded my driving and uploaded it to a central source, processed it, and converted that into edits for me to confirm. Such a system might exist, but I wasn't able to figure out where it was or how to use it. If they want more users to contribute the system needs to be easier. Same for Wikis.

New opportunities and directions open up all the time! AI is opening a whole new salient to attack the gatekeepers.

Craft is Wikipedia / OSM for software. We're building an open source AI software factory to agentically remake everything.

We're going to open source all the apps, turn platforms into protocols, build open infra, and help assist open weights.

Everything will be rewritten as high quality open source software. And once we've covered the space of everything people use, we'll turn the components into highly reusable open source libraries that can be reshaped into new workflows in real time.

We're going to make a seamless bridge between local and cloud AI, we're going to make a rich set of primitives for fine tuning and sharing.

Not just applications. Data, infra, hardware, the whole of technology.

https://github.com/storytold

https://discord.gg/artcraft

I was done with OSM within a few days. I fixed some streams to be in the right place, reverted.

This post box is no longer there. "I'll drive round and check", "no need I'm stood there, it has gone". "I'll drive round tomorrow"...I got the impression i was on someone else's patch and gave up

> then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too

”We should respect freedoms and not restrict them arbitrarily… except when I do not like the people using those freedoms.“

It is always a weird take to me. Pick a license that matches your preferences, like the GPL. Do not pick MIT/whatever and then complain when corps make use of the freedoms you afforded them.

I look forward to human curation to be reinvented in some way. Social media algos are a tyranny. I think something new will be driven by people's desire to be different and niche.

We need a dev voucher system. Persist it across projects and time. Belonging to a vouching chain with a rogue dev down the chain loses you points the closer you are to it. Anything else is just too unreliable imo.

In the end there's no foolproof way, so we'll just have to converge on the idea that quality is what matters.

Good AI contributions are better than lazy crap or trolling from humans, right?

You've discovered some sentient non humans have you?

> On top of that comes that all those projects aim for a neutral POV, which is very non-human to begin with and only going to benefit AI.

LLMs are not more neutral than humans. Not only because their learning material is biased but also because they can develop unexpected biases due to the non-deterministic and emergent nature of generative AI.

The idea that an LLM would be more neutral and less partial than a human is a very dangerous and very wrong one. It misunderstands the very nature of generative AI.

And while some people are able to tolerate AI generated text, a lot of people would never read Grokipedia. I would not. Despite great progress, generative AI is not able to create images that don't look absolutely disgusting in the eyes of actual artists. And the same is true for text output for anyone who cares about writing.

Power attracts the corruptible

Exactly. Erosion of the Internet's commons by spam, abuse, botting etc. were always a problem they had to contend with, but it's gotten way worse recently, to the point where several are either failing to cope or already dead (like StackOverflow).

The food shelf I volunteered at yesterday is a lot more than 20 years old. There'll probably not be another Wikipedia, because we already have Wikipedia. There's no point in having a second. Assembly for other things listed. We have one. Why would we need a second one to do that?

I don't know what the future will be, but the future people who live in it will know and they're going to do something. I can say that with confidence, even without knowing exactly what they're going to do.

edit: grammar - see reply for old/wrong version.

> Totally agree, with AI it feels like we will actually accelerate that or be able to take on more ambitious projects as per the things you mentioned, its been a laborious effort by mankind. Now imagine we really want to do open maps, communication, even search.

But then it'll just be your AI slop and no one will care. If they want one they'll slop one up themselves instead of using yours.

The people building these technologies do not have a good understanding of humanity (they have some oversimplified view focused on reducing friction), and even if they did their goal is not to help communities from but rather extract the most profit for themselves out of society. They won't maintain the friction that helps communities form and keeps them cohesive, just like they won't maintain the friction that keeps us healthy as individuals.

> There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.

That's a fantasy. The technological trend is towards more corporate ownership and more misinformation (or if there's less, it will only be because the corporate overlord AIs will suppress misinformation that's against their interests, and promote other misinformation that suits them better).

I think you're generalizing a brief summer, when the web was new and the power-that-be had not yet muster their resources to control it, as the natural state, when it was really a happy but unsustainable state.