Of course. Copyleft ftw!

Or fork it, add your own features

U would have to have software development skills for that. What if u’r an Amazon worker who just wants to have a platform where u n ur co-workers can freely organise a strike without censorship? U’r screwed now.

I don’t know how well this would fare, because it sounds to me like you’re replacing the dev lead position with a democracy/hivemind.

You raise very valid points here n in the text that follows. However, if u think about it, it turns to a democracy vs dictatorship debate.

“What would the peasants know about governing a country? A country should be governed only by experts because they know what’s best for everyone”. Of course u’r not saying stuff to this extent, but that’s kinda it. And u’r right. Dictatorships have a high risk to reward ratio. If u get a good dictator, progress can be tremendous. If u get a bad dictator, u die. Democracies generally tend to be a lot more stable and last longer.

U can see the above trend in case of failure rates of cooperatives and corporations. Coops have a significantly less rate of failure when compared to corporations..

As for why we don’t have social media coops? Well, social media is a pretty recent invention. It required a ton of investment to become profitable. In the capitalist model that we live in today, equity is the biggest n easiest way of fundraising. U can’t do equity based fundraising for coops. Fundraising for coops has to be in the form of bonds n loans, which is very hard to get for such new tech.

That’s my hypothesis as to why we don’t have many social media coops running around. Take groceries however. There r retail coops practically everywhere, n in some countries they make up a huge huge chunk of the market share. Take the example of credit unions. They’ve practically existed forever n have provided much better services to their members when compared to banks.

Now I am confused, are you able to make changes to the Lemmy codebase? A fork?

That’s not what I’m doing yet, although it is definitely something that I would need to do ahead.

The platform that I’m developing has a much larger scope compared to Lemmy. It’s not just a “Fediverse’s Reddit”, but something entirely different. It has community chat functionalities similar to those of discord for example. Communities would also be able to organize in person events and so on.

If you want to find a way to fund development, why not just work with the current team?

I’m achieving most of the above functionalities without altering the lemmy backend source code. I’m doing this by kinda creatively using the Lemmy Client that I’m developing.

Lemmy’s entire goal is very different from my goal for the coop. My 0 competency in Rust also makes me useless for Lemmy devs.

I’m essentially just taking Lemmy’s source code, n jerry rigging it to get the functionality that I want while ensuring that my platform won’t affect Lemmy users in a bad way during federation.

Of course, I would have to do some backend work to get certain functionality, but I can do that without touching Lemmy’s backend code. Not touching Lemmy’s code would be good for maintenance n overall development at least for now, when the only resource is me haha.

I have an MVP coming up by this Sunday, so I would start posting about it from a new account. I find the client to be quite unique n beautiful looking, n m quite excited to present it to the world now haha.

I assume this new platform still has instances (i.e. is federated), except that each one is somehow required (under the threat of defederation maybe?) to operate in this “worker-consumer coop” model? Or are we talking about some centralized organization that oversees all instances?

Yes, it would be federated. No, there wouldn’t be restrictions on anyone to host this in a particular way if they want to. The license is copyleft at the end of the day. The coop platform would do two things- develop software n host that software. If somebody else wants to host that software, they can freely do that. However, maybe getting coop endorsement for ur instance would require u to pass certain conditions determined by the consumer n worker body.

What prevents a Lemmy instance from trying this today? It sounds like this is something you want to try out?

Nothing. A lemmy instance can definitely try this model out. But remember, my coop proposal is not just for instance hosting but primarily for development of the software that is to be hosted. Starting something like this requires either dedicated devs, or a lot of capital investment to pay these devs before getting revenue. In my case, I think I’m a motivated dev willing to work for nothing in the beginning to get this thing working.

What does the paid tier get you? What’s the difference between the paid tier of this new system, and the donations model of Lemmy?

To clarify- the instance would also have a free tier. Making an account and operating it in itself would be free. However, VOTING rights need u to pay money.

How’s this different from Lemmy’s donations model? Well, Lemmy is a benevolent dictatorship. As amazing as the Lemmy devs are, they aren’t beholden to do what u say. Let’s say u tell them to develop feature A. But they want to develop feature B. U have two options: stop donating or suck it up and let them develop feature B.

In the coop model, as u r a member owner, u would be able to control exactly how ur money is being spent. The difference would work exactly like living under a dictatorship (which has a good dictator for now) vs a democracy.

Hey, thanks for the response.

What would be the monthly membership fee?

I’m thinking of something like a minimum of 4.99/monthly contribution to become a member. Although I could change this amount with a little more market research. Just a quick clarification though. U wouldn’t need to pay money for an account. U can be a free user. U just won’t get voting rights, n u won’t be able to participate in moderator elections.

What would be a reasonable SLA? If there is an outage on a Friday night, are the members okay if they wait until Monday to get it back someone online?

I don’t believe there needs to be an official SLA. The coop isn’t offering a service per say in exchange of money. It’s kinda offering 90% of the service for free. Paying money gets u VOTING rights. U get a member share. U get to propose n vote on legislation to get what u want. Therefore, members would naturally propose and vote for the best service possible from the funds available.

What do you think is a good hour rate to pay for an admin? What should you pay for someone to stay on call?

Depends on:

• Availability of funds
• Need for more employees
• Market rate

At the beginning, I would be the sole worker (the MVP is getting ready by Sunday). Decisions regarding hiring more workers for x pay would be made with time direct democratically by the worker and consumer body of the coop.

Can I run bots? How many? Does each bot count as a separate account?

The consumer n worker bodies would decide that. I personally would have no issues letting people run bots that are functional in nature n those that explicitly let themselves be known as bots. But again, detailed bot policies would be made by the members.

I think you’ll see that as soon as you start asking people to put money and to feel like they “own” it, the demands will increase and so will the costs.

Honestly, I think the demands would give the coop enough pressure to take the most efficient decisions possible. They would give it a good developmental direction imo. Of course, I’m not saying that they can’t get toxic. But I think I would prefer the toxicity of a democratic legislature any day over that of a rich shareholder.

Examples of other similar coops

The coops u mentioned seem to be primarily instance hosting coops. I’m talking more in terms of software development. Development of the lemmy backend n the client by the coop would be the primary focus of legislature instead of instance policies. Which features to sanction the development for and so on.

Hey Joe, This coop platform does everything that Reddit does, plus:

• U can u use it for free.
• Reddit has ads. This has 0 ads.
• Reddit’s algorithms r meant to be addictive. If u aren’t addicted to Reddit, u won’t see ads, n u won’t earn them profit. The coop platform isn’t interested in making u addicted. U and ur loved ones can use this platform without fearing that its designers intend to get u addicted to it.
• Your data would remain private. It wouldn’t be sold off to anyone. Reddit however, steals your data to profit off of it.
• If u can pay x amount of money per month, u can become a member.
• If u r a member, u get to propose and vote on legislation. U get to decide how funds r allocated, what work gets done and so on.
• U don’t own Reddit. The rich folk who own Reddit can censor u anytime they want to. Do u want to talk about forming unions? Do u want to organize strikes? Reddit can censor u anytime.
• U don’t own Reddit. U can’t control Reddit’s policies. U can control the coop platform’s policies.
• The difference is like living under a dictatorship and living under a democracy.
• If u don’t have money, u can still use the platform. As it’s not owned by billionaires (but rather working class people paying a monthly fee), u can still trust it not to become hostile and censor heavy.

But I also don’t agree with the assessment that it would bring more users in.

Yea, I’m also not that confident about this point. I guess experimentation is the only way to find out haha.

While democratizing an instance seems interesting, if I were constantly in the minority for instance changes, it would be better for me to save my money and simply find an instance that aligns with my preferences.

Fair point. Although this is more than instance management. It’s software development with an instance as a bonus. The biggest legislation would be to do with software development - which feature to develop first, when to hire devs, how much to pay, who to hire and so on. Considering that it’s a big project, I don’t think u would get that many other instances to just shift ur donations towards.

You’d also need a pretty significant amount of paid users to be able to pay any sort of salary

True. That’s y I’m kinda considering approaching unions, political parties, other cooperatives n so on to give em a custom branded instance (including an app and so on). That way, we could get a better scale. Again, it’s kinda all up in the air now. We would get data regarding this only after I start approaching people and spreading the idea.

additional headache of sorting out payroll for people who are likely in several different countries

Eh that would happen if the worker and consumer bodies vote to do that. I don’t see why they would do that in the beginning, when resources r so strapped.

I’m not saying don’t try it (anakin), it could maybe be pretty cool, but it seems like a long shot to me personally.

Yeah… I guess actually trying it would give a better insight. I’m a little hopeful tbh. If the product is good and useful, then getting funds for it is a communication issue, which is solvable.

Twitter blue checks don’t make u an owner, n don’t give u direct democratic rights to pass legislation at Twitter. They don’t give u rights to decide which feature you want next, what the membership price must be, who to hire, who to fire, what the salaries of workers should be, whether we should blow money on rebrands or not, and so on.

Getting a membership at the coop would get u these rights.

Nono, I don’t think that the Lemmy model would fail either. It just would… trudge along (if that’s even a word haha). The potential of Lemmy is huge. In my opinion, we should totally push to get more and more users in. In other words, I think we should actively compete with corporate social media. Why?

For one, corporate social media is exploitative af. I wouldn’t want my mum on that, with all of her data being stolen by the overlords. As for Lemmy, as much as I love the devs and the amazing work that they do, they are kinda like benevolent dictators. What they want to work wouldn’t always overlap with what their donors want them to work on. Of course, they have the right to not involve donors. They are working for peanuts right now. But because of this financial inefficiency going on here, development isn’t fast enough. My mum would find it very hard to use Lemmy for instance.

I would like my mum to be on this platform. I would like her to see how cool it is. However, for that to happen, money needs to flow here. We need more developers (who get respectable salaries). The model that I’m proposing would ensure both, workers’ and consumers’ rights here. My hypothesis is that consumers would be more interested to put in money in a platform that they can democratically participate in. Workers would like to work in a platform where they too can participate democratically and earn respectable amounts of money.

If we have to make this competitive, then I believe that we would have to adopt the above model. The donations based model just seems too chill to take on the corporations imo.

I see. Thanks for the response! :)

What problem would this be solving? How would it improve on what’s already on offer?

The goal of corporate social media is to purely generate profits for their owners. This has led to extremely addictive algorithms, privacy breaches, etc. as they generate more profits. These corporations are essentially selling digital tobacco. Everyone knows its bad, but it’s very hard to stop using it.

Non profit charity institutions like Lemmy and Mastodon are currently trying to present an alternative to this. The problem is, that they are nowhere close to the funding that corporate social media has. Also, while they are open source (a big improvement of course), they still aren’t quite democratic. Just because an institution is non profit, it doesn’t automatically make it democratic. Take a look at Mozilla for instance.

So how would the coop be better? Well, for one it would be democratic. Coop members would be able to directly propose and vote on legislation. This would give them a lot more power over coop operations. This way, you wouldn’t have stupid budget allocations like in the case of Mozilla.

Are there any benefits to being a member or a worker, compared to a regular subscription model and a job?

Worker members would be proper employees of the coop with a salary and all that. As for the consumer members, they would have direct control over what the coop does. How would this be different from a subscription? Well, in the case of a normal subscription, you just hand over money to a corporation and expect a service. How much of that subscription actually goes to the workers/feature development/pockets of shareholders is not in your control. It’s like paying taxes without having a say over what they would be used for.

In case of the coop, you would have a say over how the membership fees are used. You would be able to direct which features are to be developed first and so on. You would be able to vote on moderator elections. Basically, democracy!

If I’ve to say this in short, it would be this: corporate social media platforms are dictatorships which care only about profit generation. Non profit corporations are benevolent dictatorships. They can be good, but also corrupt. The coop model that I’m proposing would be a direct democracy that puts the interests of consumers and workers ahead of everything.

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Awh that’s nice of u. Thanks for donating n keeping these platforms alive :).

I’d be surprised if that kind of model could pay competitive developer salaries.

Same lol. Although I’m trying not to be too pessimistic. Perhaps a little bit of nagging (like Wikipedia does), visual funding meters, the idea of a cooperative social media platform instead of a corporate owned one and so on might raise enough money to give acceptable salaries to devs. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Thanks for the resource! This seems to be more of a fediverse server hosting coop. I was talking about a coop for developing the software that these guys host (and a coop that might also have its own instance hosted as well).

Basically, getting a developer or two, paying them a wage to develop this stuff.

I see. So just to clarify, you r saying that the incentive to vote for coop legislation, moderator elections and so on isn’t worth paying money for on its own, correct?

I’ve seen coop models working kiiiiinda okay for server maintenance. I was talking more in terms of raw development + maintenance. Lemmy needs SO MANY features, but simply lacks funds to hire devs to get stuff done. Sure, there r devs willing to donate their time, but still… Isn’t there a way other than charity for this?

Interesting. Although the “pay for feature” falls in the charity trap again, no? People unfortunately aren’t willing to donate much (see the peanuts that Lemmy devs get for instance).

I don’t think “donate to vote” is particularly appealing to the average user.

Hmm… It adds a value proposition though, doesn’t it? A simple “donate so that we can keep running n developing” doesn’t seem to be working that well for Lemmy it seems.

Saying, “if you donate, u literally get to participate in legislation for the future development of the coop” + stuff like special badges kinda provide SOME more value than the free user, no?

I dunno, I can’t really think of a better way for fundraising directly from consumers other than this. A third option is offering special, branded internal social media platforms (like Yammer) for businesses, but that’s it.

I so so wish if we could have a user funded nice, completely developed fediverse social media platform that also is a coop haha.

I first read “fediverse coup” and got excited.

🤨

Yeah that’s true unfortunately. But the goal is NOT to be so small always. What if we had a good, properly developed and funded social media platform that was a cooperative at the same time? That’s the idea.

Right now, while Lemmy (and the fediverse in general) is nice, it clearly lacks developmental resources purely due to a lack of funds. Most devs here are contributing on a voluntary basis.

Why shouldn’t devs get to earn a living by working on a project that is meant to do actual good for society? Why shouldn’t social media consumers get to have a platform that doesn’t treat them as data mines?

That’s kinda the idea. Not just to maintain Lemmy’s userbase, but to actually get more users who are presently on corporate social media platforms.

The idea is to exit from the charity model. So the workers would be full fledged salaried employees. The end goal being to replace traditional corporate social media platforms by this cooperative one.