rglullis @ rglullis @communick.news

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2 yr. ago

Scale however does not matter.

Of course the scale of the business matters. If scale doesn't matter, a bunch of farmers selling their produce at a local market would be bad for their local community as Walmart.

keep investors/a for-profit structure out.

Putting these two in the same bag is a mistake, this is what OP and I are saying.

Context and scale matters. Even though both small and big companies depend "on profit", the methods they use and incentives that drive them are wildly different.

therefore it’s better to create hierarchical organisations with some benevolent dictators.

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?

I believe that power always corrupts so it’s not a good solution.

What makes you believe that cooperatives are free from power games and political disputes?

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.

coops and non-profits and all sorts of structures exist for way more complex and difficult to quantify organizations

The fact that they exist does not imply that they were ever able to serve their community/customers/users universally. You either get some people being served well at an inefficient overall cost, or you get everyone being served poorly by a broken system which can not afford to provide adequate resources to workers.

IOW, I'm not arguing that "coops" can not exist. What I am arguing is we will never get rid of Big Tech if we keep forcing the idea that only community-owned services are acceptable models of governance.

You’ll never be able to compete with mega corps

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".

Is it really that difficult to think we can financially quantify people’s roles?

In a centrally-planned system? Yes, it is very hard.

I was a freelancer for 15 years, I had to quantify jobs constantly.

I assume you mean that you had to give a quote to a client?

If that is the case, your client has sole decision-making power and has "only" to evaluate whether the price you were asking for your labor is lower than the value you'd be bringing them.

How does this compare with a coop, where (presumably) the member-owners have all to agree on the price of labor? Are they going to accept to pay market rate for the people working there? Are they first find whoever is willing to work for the cheapest and then set the price on that?

Why would it have to be cheaper?

"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.

How do you decide "what they deserve"? What should be the payment for a moderator, or an instance admin? What of you have someone also making contributions to the software and as such is in a position to add features exclusive to one instance?

Can you make a list of coops that provide service to its members and is overall cheaper than the equivalent commercial offerings?

If your idea for a good way to spend your hard-earned money is "to own" a service provider that gives you the privilege of participating in absolutely low stakes meetings, then sure, go for it. If you want, I can set up a server for you and you get in charge of finding members to join. Deal?

It need to be people owned.

Sounds good on paper, but the practical implementations make them not any different than any other small service provider. cosocial.ca is a Canadian co-op for Mastodon. To become a member, you must pay CA$50 per year. What kind of "ownership" does that give to you as member? Nothing, really. You can not take control of the domain or the server.

At best, you'll get some bureaucratic oversight and the "right" to make proposals regarding changes in governance: "use the money to upgrade the server or to pay the admin", "Allow some members to get free access because they are facing some hardship, yes or no?" etc.

But at the end of the day, is any of that "ownership" making you (or the other members) better off compared to a service like mastodon.green, which simply charges $1/month and gives you an account?

My own Communick offers managed hosting for things like Mastodon, Matrix, Lemmy, PixelFed, GoToSocial, Takahe for those that want to have their own server but do not want to deal with the hassle of managing it or worrying about security updates. I also offer paid accounts: $29/year gives you an account at all of our "flagship" instances: meaning you can get an account on Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix and Funkwhale.

There are other providers like omg.lol (Mastodon account at social.lol and some other cool services for $20/year) and mastodon.green (accounts cost $1/month).

All of these servers are of course smaller and less popular than the ones that are open for registration, but unsurprisingly they are stable, well managed, free of drama and (AFAIK) never been linked to spammers or trolls. IOW, "you get what you pay for".

Valve is a company with $BILLIONS in revenue per year. The problem is the size of the corporations, not the profit incentive.

I think we need more companies, but each of them smaller in headcount and customer base. For the Fediverse, this is perfect.

To illustrate the point: all I really want from Communick is to get to 10000 paying customers. That would bring $300k in revenue, I would be able to draw a good salary from it (still less than any drone from Big Tech makes though), make good on my pledge to give 20% of profits to developers, hire some people to help with moderation and so on...

Notice that 10 thousand users is less than 1% of the current amount of people in the Fediverse, if we had half of the users interested in this model, it would mean that there is room for (at least!) another 50 small businesses like mine, which is more than enough to have a healthy competition around.

Yeah, let's make things less abstract and talk about real examples.

piefed.social is not sending the real voters out. You think that alone should be grounds to get lemmy.ml (your instance) to defederate them. Am I understanding you correctly?

I’m not sure if this has happened yet

I have more than 15 topic-specific instances, and we are in absolute agreement about why this is the best arrangement for group federation.

Also, thank you very much for leading by example. Lets hope the bigger instances also see the value in the initiative.

Yes, but that's kind of my point?

if downvotes are public, the admin of your instance can see who is downvoting you and then they can take action. If the downvotes are coming from an instance that hides the real user for every vote, you and the admin are SOL.

If the same user downvotes everything I’ve ever said,

Right. How would you know what "the same user" is? Let's say that your posts get downvoted at random intervals by 5-10 users in the first 45-120 minutes. They all have different user names. What are you going to do? Create a report against any particular user and hope that the mods look into it?

How would that work? How would an admin separate downvotes from brigaders and legitimate users who happen to downvote a comment?

That creates an incentive for trolls to create accounts at the popular instances using this mechanism in order to destroy their reputation.