Exactly. Inflation ughhh… I can’t even afford to buy two dishes a day… :(
Me till someone calls me a good boy uwu
Who said there would be no centralised command? It would just be opt out. If an individual/community wanted to opt out of this, there would be noone forcing them to not do so.
As for evolution of political systems due to natural selection, would you say the same about democracy? Stable democracy that we know about today has existed only for the past 300 years. Women got the right to vote this century. If u r living under a dictatorship, would you use the same argument of natural selection to not fight for a democracy?
LMAO
Tankies rlly r delusional, huh
U r assuming that anarchists would be peaceful n just roll over on their backs to show their tummies to Genghis Khan.
The goal of anarchism is freedom. The existence of a State means no freedom. Thus, anarchist militias unite to fight this threat. A stateless society doesn’t equate an unorganised society.
Just that they think that using house rules everyone agrees on is a great idea.
Kinda. The most important part is that if someone disagrees with the house rules, they can choose to disassociate from the house and go somewhere else. There’s no state to say “this open field that’s not utilized is mine, bitch!” and then taze you.
Which I’m also not opposed to, if it was set up well
Wonderful! I’m working on it hard and fast. U’ll most likely start seeing updates on it (actual images of the UI and so on) hopefully from tomorrow. I have an MVP almost ready (around 2 hrs of work remaining). I’ll post about this from a different account soon!
I’m selling both. I’m saying that my functional product is superior because it has been developed democratically. At no point will some MBA guy waste money on a pointless rebrand when it could have been spent on some necessary feature. At no point will some rando billionaire come up and say, “ok, links in posts will be indistinguishable from images”.
Again, same reason why democracies r almost always superior to dictatorships. Democratic governments work for the people more when compared to dictatorships. It makes the products n services that they offer superior.
Ik he sucks, but u have to admit- he is quite sexy
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:
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:
WAIT THEY DID??? YEAH BAYBEEEEE
Vaush, a market socialist streamer. He claims to be anarchist (but is actually more of a libertarian socialist who likes the existence of a market).
He has made jokes about horse cocks before. He also accidentally opened a folder containing loli and horse cocks on stream once .
There’s also an old out of context clip of him floating around “justifying cp because we abuse kids in labor camps that we get our rare earth metals, t-shirts, shoes n stuff like that from”.
That is NOT what he meant to say. If u see it in full context, he was displaying the contradictions of neo liberalism, where working conditions even for children are absolutely shit. We hate child porn (as we should), but we don’t hate the horrendous working conditions that our corporations make kids from poor countries go through. We justify stuff like this by pointing at the low cost that results from this cheap labor. This is absolutely disgusting. He was trying to say this, but got clipped out of context.
Doesn’t help that tankies absolutely hate him too (he’s a libertarian socialist who is pro Ukraine and anti CCP). I’m not saying that the guy is clean. Maybe he is a pedo. Maybe he isn’t. However, an accusation like that requires some sort of evidence. Without it, it’s just ad hominem. The amount of hatred that starts flowing after u even mention the guy’s name is unjustified imo. I agree with him on some issues, n I disagree with him on others. Then, I move on. People unfortunately don’t do that.
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.
