Taylor SmithMar 11
JA Westenberg

The entire machinery of online discourse around building and creating has been so thoroughly captured by entrepreneurial "logic" that we've lost the language to describe what it feels like to simply make a thing that helps someone, give it away, and move on with your life...

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-noble-path/

The Noble Path

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an indie hacker in possession of a widget must be in want of a business model... Every tool is a startup now. Every script is a SaaS product. Every neat little hack you cobbled together on a Sunday afternoon to solve your own

Westenberg.
Mar 11 at 5:14amTypefully
Show threadcolapunk 🎂Mar 11

@Daojoan thanks for this great read, you should paywall it ;)

I always get blank stares when i do stuff for people, help them move, fix their bike, lend them something, build them something, and when they ask what to pay me or do/give back, i just say no. Not everything has to be quid pro quo -voor wat hoort wat in dutch-, but very few people understand this.

Show threadmuddleMar 11
@Daojoan yeah, stone soup.
Show threadJez NicholsonMar 11
@Daojoan Creators of #OpenStreetMap read this and recognise yourselves! Had we been working for a company then it would never have been built... and we would never have had the joy (and in-depth pedantry) it gives us
Show threadMoMar 11
@Daojoan Very interesting to read. @a_koschinski
Show threadMatthias JohnsonMar 11
@Daojoan thank you for this. You're hitting on a lot of things I've been chewing on. I always felt that tech should make life better, but it's all become just tooling for hyper-growth fueled aspirations.
Show threadRob IsaacMar 11

@Daojoan This is fucking great.

I think the sentence “eople should get paid for their work” was meant to read “People.”

Show threadJB (he/him)Mar 11
@Daojoan
I feel seen. Every time I make something, I start getting advice on how to market it.
Show threadStephenMar 11
@Daojoan I found this great.

I think there's also a complementary factor in the form of entitlement from people who demand yet more than what they already received. The people who hound free webcomic artists for more art, and programmers for updates and fixes, as though in putting their creation out there for whomever wants, they have bound themselves to satisfy those people forever.

Also slightly surprised not to find any mention of Marx and alienation of labour. It's alienation even if you do it to yourself (of course as you've said, it's not really something you do to yourself but something the culture demands of you...)
Show threadfluffy 💜Mar 11

@Daojoan This has been a whole Thing with the Song Fight! community as well. People make music for the joy of making music and for getting better at doing it and getting peoples' feedback and so on. The only thing you win is the satisfaction of knowing people liked your music.

And yet people are always trying to cheat at it, or sometimes we'll get people who think it needs to be monetized and there needs to be a "real prize."

Show threadDaleMar 11

@Daojoan
This whole story reminds me of Valetudo: project for freeing up vacuum robots from cloud.
Its developer does everything by himself and strongly opposes any attempts of monetisation/value extraction based on the project. And a "community growth" is a declared non-goal of the project for him.

And for that he is passionately hated by some people on reddit.

Show threadJustin ScholzMar 11
@Daojoan it‘s about paying it forward, not paying it back :)