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.
Sounds like Twitter blue checks.
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.
Fair enough. But I also don’t agree with the assessment that it would bring more users in. There are already a ton of instances to pick from. 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. You’d also need a pretty significant amount of paid users to be able to pay any sort of salary, plus the additional headache of sorting out payroll for people who are likely in several different countries. If you just wanted to offset server costs that would be significantly smaller in scope, but then no paid mods.
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.