The idea is simple. A worker-consumer hybrid coop that develops, maintains and hosts a lemmy-like fediverse platform that is open sourced.
There r two pricing tiers- a free and paid tier. If u pay a monthly membership fee, you become a member of the consumer body. If u r hired by the coop, u of course become part of the worker body.
The core of the coop's workings are direct democratic. Creating, filling and destroying job positions are all done direct democratically. To pass a piece of legislation, either one of the following conditions need to be met:
- Simple passing: Both, worker and consumer bodies cast more than 50% votes each for the given bill.
- Consumer override: If the consumer body casts more than two thirds of the votes for a bill.
Assume that the quality of the platform is as good as Lemmy is right now. Assume that the functionality is similar too.
Would you be interested in being a member? Do u think this is a good idea?
I personally find Lemmy's current donations based model to be severely lacking from a fundraising point of view. There needs to be a better form of organisation imo.
The direct democratic consumer coop element would bring in more people imo. I'm hoping that the worker coop element prevents worker exploitation.
Do you think this is an absolutely horseshit idea? Or do u kinda like it? Or do u have any suggestions? I'm seriously considering this, which is what made me ask this here. I have a Lemmy client nearing the MVP stage which I was developing with this purpose in mind. Sorry if this is the wrong community for the post.
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.
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.
Alright. Let's think of a random Joe, that uses reddit. A cousin, a friend, etc. What would be the pitch for them to give this coop social network a try?
For example:
Hey Joe, I know you like Reddit, check this out...
Hey Joe, This coop platform does everything that Reddit does, plus:
It sounds like you're selling an ideology then, not a functional product.
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.