pory

Well exactly. The VC projects get to accelerate their “right now” factor with money. Money that doesn’t need to make a return on investment for another x years. That means, before those products start their hostile monetization campaigns, they will be unequivocally the best in their field by any metric other than “libre as in freedom”.

Look at Twitter. Did people that jumped ship jump to the relatively mature but “fiddly” federated platforms, or did they jump to “it’s literally Twitter but without ads and grok” in Bluesky?

We’re on Lemmy, so we’re obviously in a group more willing to tolerate “it’s an open protocol with some weirdness but that’s better than being on one corporation’s server beholden to their rules and TOS”.

Anyone switching from Plex to Emby in 2026 instead of to Jellyfin chose Emby for a reason. For them, Emby is a “better” product and “still free” the way Plex was free for all meaningful features (hardware acceleration, remote streaming…) in 2018. Maybe it’ll never happen, maybe it’ll take until 2030, who knows, but Emby is in the exact same state that Plex was before Plex closed the source and started rent-seeking.

The main reason is that if you switch from Plex to Emby you’re going from paid licenseware (fully enshittified) to paid licenseware (not fully enshittified yet). It’s like when everyone finally dropped Skype and moved to… Discord. Which hey it’s closed source and owned by venture capital, but it doesn’t suck yet!!! And now in 2026, Discord is what Discord is.

Personally, my favorite thing about GOG is that I don’t need a client at all. I can access my whole GOG “library” without a storefront launcher app installed on my computer. Since I keep the installer files backed up, I don’t even need to sign into an account. If I wanted a storefront/launcher app in between me and the games, Steam is a better one. GOG is for launcherless DRM-free games.