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:

  1. Simple passing: Both, worker and consumer bodies cast more than 50% votes each for the given bill.
  2. 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.

  • UraniumBlazer@lemm.eeOPEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Now I am confused, are you able to make changes to the Lemmy codebase? A fork?

    That’s not what I’m doing yet, although it is definitely something that I would need to do ahead.

    The platform that I’m developing has a much larger scope compared to Lemmy. It’s not just a “Fediverse’s Reddit”, but something entirely different. It has community chat functionalities similar to those of discord for example. Communities would also be able to organize in person events and so on.

    If you want to find a way to fund development, why not just work with the current team?

    I’m achieving most of the above functionalities without altering the lemmy backend source code. I’m doing this by kinda creatively using the Lemmy Client that I’m developing.

    Lemmy’s entire goal is very different from my goal for the coop. My 0 competency in Rust also makes me useless for Lemmy devs.

    I’m essentially just taking Lemmy’s source code, n jerry rigging it to get the functionality that I want while ensuring that my platform won’t affect Lemmy users in a bad way during federation.

    Of course, I would have to do some backend work to get certain functionality, but I can do that without touching Lemmy’s backend code. Not touching Lemmy’s code would be good for maintenance n overall development at least for now, when the only resource is me haha.

    I have an MVP coming up by this Sunday, so I would start posting about it from a new account. I find the client to be quite unique n beautiful looking, n m quite excited to present it to the world now haha.