I use Bluesky and Mastodon. Mastodon better hits where I want the fediverse to go but Bluesky is so much easier to use. Signup, UI, flagship app, feeds, and content is just so much less of a headache. But it feels like it’s a matter of time before it’s enshittified.
I was thinking about how much I hate big tech but there’s a lot of small and mid-size companies that I have neutral to positive views on. Canonical, Mozilla, 37 Signals, Odoo are the ones that come to mind. All of those have a revenue model but also actively support open source initiatives and developers. None are perfect but better than “big tech” and get more done than just donation based development.
It feels like there needs to be some for-profit companies (without ads and maintaining privacy) that can help support the development around ActivityPub and maintain apps and servers that are easier to onboard and easier to use. Does this exist?
What could be some non-evil revenue models? I pay $20/month for a blogging platform for my business website. Maybe have a service to host AP servers for businesses or journalists? Personal private encrypted cloud services like photo backups that are integrated with AP?
Can you make a list of coops that provide service to its members and is overall cheaper than the equivalent commercial offerings?
Why would it have to be cheaper? I’m not going to make a list. It’s a normal form of organisation in my country. For example my whole apartment complex is owned by the people who live there. We vote on what we want to pay in rent and how we want to spent the money.
And the same can be done with data coops. Here is one: https://data.coop/
There are others, with other values.
“Being cheaper” is a very good proxy for “being more accessible” and “easier to be universally accepted”.
If the coop model gives you some (real or perceived) benefit to you, great. But if the cost of acquiring/maintaining those benefits are too high, it becomes more of yet-another status symbol than an actual development for society at large.
You’ll never be able to compete with mega corps that can scale and sell your data, in order to provide a service for free. Price will never be the selling point of a more democratic web.
I gave an example elsewhere on this post: cosocial (a coop) charges $50/year from its members for Mastodon access. mastodon.green (not a coop) charges $12/year. Communick (not a coop) charges $29/year for Mastodon and Lemmy and Matrix and Funkwhale with 250GB of storage. omg.lol charges $20/year for Mastodon, and some other cool web services.
All of these small and independent service providers are offering more than a coop, and they can not scale beyond a certain point. If the service is built on FOSS, then it means that if the business model becomes successful it will face competition.
Painting co-ops as the only alternative against Big Tech is the mistake, here. Smaller ISVs could make things cheaper, serve the market ethically and efficiently without requiring everyone to worry about “owner duties”.
You don’t have to have everybody worry about owner duty. Cooperatives doesn’t have to be tiny organisations. You can have full time employees and so on: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_cooperative_movement
Ok. Could you maybe focus on the core point of the argument instead of “well, actually”-ing into the details of co-op structuring?
The point I’m trying to make is that the more “people-owned” any organization it is, and the more people are practically involved in the decision-making process, the less efficient it will be and the more costly it will be compared with a business that is solely focused on creating a financially sustainable operation.
So yes, you can certainly make a co-op with dedicated employees and not have all members involved in the governance apparatus. But if you are going that route, you are not that different from any other business and the “members” are not that different from regular stockholders who are just subject to an executive board. And if you are not going that route to show support for the process more than the actual service, you may end up with something “nice” but which will unquestionably cost a lot more (relatively speaking) than a simpler commercial alternative.
Because you are making the tired old authoritarian argument that democracy is slow, and therefore it’s better to create hierarchical organisations with some benevolent dictators. And I believe that power always corrupts so it’s not a good solution. You believe some different so we will never agree.
That is a non-sequitur and a misrepresentation of my argument. I’m talking about having smaller independent software commercial providers, where the relationship between parties is guided mostly by free trade. Who is the “benevolent dictator” in this scenario?
What makes you believe that cooperatives are free from power games and political disputes?