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.
Personally I prefer free range Fediverses.
But seriously, I think it’s still an extremely tough sell to get people to pay for social media. I also think this is only meaningfully effective at a pretty large scale, I think the fediverse is better with many small servers. If we do want this sort of larger scale development I don’t think “donate to vote” is particularly appealing to the average user.
I think a more enticing model I think is pay for feature work. An estimate is made for a features difficulty and then users donate (with some sort of fee to go towards server maintenance/upkeep) towards a feature and if the goal is reached the feature is worked on. This is already a popular model for particularly translations of freeware.
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).
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.