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.
Nono, I don't think that the Lemmy model would fail either. It just would... trudge along (if that's even a word haha). The potential of Lemmy is huge. In my opinion, we should totally push to get more and more users in. In other words, I think we should actively compete with corporate social media. Why?
For one, corporate social media is exploitative af. I wouldn't want my mum on that, with all of her data being stolen by the overlords. As for Lemmy, as much as I love the devs and the amazing work that they do, they are kinda like benevolent dictators. What they want to work wouldn't always overlap with what their donors want them to work on. Of course, they have the right to not involve donors. They are working for peanuts right now. But because of this financial inefficiency going on here, development isn't fast enough. My mum would find it very hard to use Lemmy for instance.
I would like my mum to be on this platform. I would like her to see how cool it is. However, for that to happen, money needs to flow here. We need more developers (who get respectable salaries). The model that I'm proposing would ensure both, workers' and consumers' rights here. My hypothesis is that consumers would be more interested to put in money in a platform that they can democratically participate in. Workers would like to work in a platform where they too can participate democratically and earn respectable amounts of money.
If we have to make this competitive, then I believe that we would have to adopt the above model. The donations based model just seems too chill to take on the corporations imo.