I’m not sure if I follow the question, let’s me try to understand.

If you are talking about a self-hosting. This isn’t the governance, this is the “deployment” of a software. I know that I talk heavily on this point on the essay, but the focus is regarding that self host is a act on the individual level, while governance is about who use the system and have a say on it.

I’ll grab a example, (I’ll avoid the Uber cliche, but maybe I need to take this one)

Imagine a N-unit building, cooperative software replaces the landlord with a transparent governance dashboard (I’m assuming that all residents own each of the units in this building). Residents propose maintenance tasks (e.g., roof leaks) and collectively vote on fund allocation using a one-unit-one-vote system. The software automatically tracks each unit’s financial contributions, schedules shared laundry slots via a consensus calendar, and logs inspection reports viewable by all. When a major expense arises, the platform facilitates a binding poll, calculates each owner’s share, and executes payment only when the quorum is met, ensuring every resident has equal say over their shared physical assets.

This is the example of governance that I was talking about. The people who use and own the building have a say on it. When something arives everyone have a way to discuss and talk, using the software as a tool to support then. Self-host is just the deployment for this system, but the focus is on the helping then to mitigate and ensure that everyone have a say in it.

I hope I got your point right.

Are you the original author? If so, thanks, I enjoyed the post! It made me think. I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed but it returns 404 for me FYI.

Fixed the link. Also added the link in the /blog, so it’s easier to follow afterwards.
Thanks for the highlight.

I’ll try to help to convey my message, which for me is the important part. Your comment touches a fair lot of points, so I’ll try to break into smaller chunks to be easier to pipe this information.

I am confused. I read your blog three times and I went to the wikipedia entry for platform cooperativism and there are a lot of complex topics behind words that I am struggling with.

I’ve faced something similar until I “decoupled” the governance from software, governance can apply to a wide range of topics, from safety, transport and software.

So keywords: “people” and “organization”

I also am struggling with the example of the residence management system.

You say you self-host for control. But then you lose control once you start collaborating with other people, right?

An individual may lose control, but the community^[1] gains the control. And a community is composed of individuals. The group effort should benefit all the individuals in the community. Which also include the myself and you.

Tons of people hate their HOAs and apartment managers. Because they lose control over their own living space.

Let me start with: “HOA is a piece of shit.”

Why I dislike that much?
Because it’s easier to lose the sense of group when you have a dictator. HOA should have the voice of all, and the vote of all. And just by doing this a lot change. People start to understand each other and interact with each other. You may have your upper neighbor until you discover that the noise he makes every day as 6am is because he have a frail back and can’t sleep properly. This is how you create empathy, and why HOA should help to improve this people.

But the common HOA from the USA is a piece of garbage, reason why I rarely use the HOA, I use other terms, like “building community”, or “condominium”, just to stay as far as possible from the stigma, and the dictatorial ways of HOA.

Also, I don’t really see how a living space management system maps to something ephemeral like software. I think that example translates to like who owns your IP address, bandwidth limits, or VPS hardware. They are the ones that get to say what you do with your “home”. If they don’t like you hosting something, they can cut you off.

Cooperated software should serve people and it’s user. I’ll use a different example, which is a cliche, but helps to provide the initial insight, and we can move steps ahead later on (if the discussion moves on this way)

Uber. If the drivers have the governance over the app, we could skip the next few billions for the stupid Dora Khashowner, and give for the actual workers that does the job, in this case the drivers. The fares for the transport could even be reduced, since the people who use the app, and the people who provide the serve can get better agreements.

This is governance over the software.

Also, most users just want what they use to work with little friction and fuss. Making everyone into voting members of everything they use is a burden I don’t think most people would want. Even people that are motivated for something will easily become burnt out when collaborating. Anyone that has played table top RPGs knows that getting a group together is hard.

The user perspective nothing change, open the app. Do the stuff. Move on with their own lifes. Governance isn’t about the people who use, but the people who provide the source for it.

But this means that the people who use understands that each coin invested (spend) in the app goes to the right governance of the app, so the people that labour in it.

[religion]

I’ll not touch in this. No religion.

I really feel like there are problems to be solved like Microsoft owns the biggest, most reliable platform that hosts open source projects, and that seems dangerous. So I am always interested when someone has ideas about making open source projects more robustly free.

This is a good point in the governance of the software development tools. But yet, this isn’t about the cooperative software.

Now on the meat of the cooperative.

Cooperative software ins’t about having a Uber app alone (still using the cliche example), but if Spain have it’s own Uber app, with the governance of the spanish drivers, with a open protocol, on open source code, Italy could have it’s own governance on the italian drivers, and both apps could work alongside, in a federated manner.

Did you notice? Open source, open protocol and federation. All working alongside, the next step is governance. The workers who provide the labour for the app to receive from the labour they already do.

Sorry, I am all over the place. Maybe this is too much for me and I should let others sort it out.

I just finished a 14h of work, debugging a very nasty bug in a production codebase for a billion dollar company. Imagine my own head at this exact moment. And yet, I want to make your mind to understand mine, when I can barely keep my eyes open.

Hope this helps :D

Block :)

Because make no mistake, federated software is not automatically a co-op either. Mastodon solves the protocol and the code. It doesn’t solve the governanceof each instance

And I agree with you.

This is the starting point, not the final destination.

I’ll ask, did you read the post?

What?!

Did you read the comment? What state any of this?

Geeezz. This is what you understood from that comment?!

What are you talking about?!

you lost me in in this nonsense

You haven’t read a single word in the blog right?

I almost want to turn this into unpaid work, except that it is paid work. Let’s break it down, imagine we’re dealing with a condominium management system. So all the people living in the building participate, everyone needs to pay the building maintenance costs, and usually this work falls to the superintendent. And often, the superintendent’s voice carries more weight, which can cause problems. What I’m proposing is to use an open tool (whether it already exists or not) to help all the residents (whether it’s one vote per apartment, or a fractional vote per resident of an apartment) and the system can help organize not just the expenses, but also facilitate discussions and the like. And of course, all of this would be self-hosted directly in the building (even an old laptop can serve a small system for 100 users without a flinch). Do you realize that as a resident, even though there’s a cost to pay for this, you end up getting the money back in the end? And you know exactly where every single penny was spent? So this is paid labor.

I was unfair in the last reply, let me address you correctly this time. You are looking at software, software is already solved. You app, software, system is your, you can deploy whenever you want. I’m talking about the bigger community, when your software isn’t yet “yours” anymore.

[…] because the moment it gets popular, someone has to pay for it, and the only people willing to pay are the ones who want to own/mine it.[…]

This is the point where needs to be own, of have the right governance, where your (as a user) desire is accounted for the system.

Hopefully this explains better.

I was going to reply, but really the edit already have the content. But the example wasn’t the perfect solution, but a given idea. Something that I already did in the past, a homemade solution for the condominium of the building where I used to live. It works, a old desktop as a server, a port forwarding in the modem and you have yourself the project up.

This project solves a specific problem, we used a lot of opensource tools (from the Linux machine to the web server), and in the end it was there working, solving the issue, collecting the needed signatures for the changes in the building.

But this is my usecase, doesn’t mean it’s the perfect, neither the best.

What’s wrong with mastodon? […]

There is nothing wrong with Mastodon, on the opposite it’s a early display of what can be done right. But yet it’s a instance, owned by a few people.

Most people don’t want to be invested in anything with it. I use mastodon once every other month. I don’t want to spend 5 bucks per month or own it. I don’t want to participate. I’m fine with rochko doing whatever he wants. What’s wrong with it?

Really? I would like to have a Piefed for my friends to share our meme for example, this is an smaller, yet common exemplo of governance.

I could suggest ya to read the links too, they provide extra info on the topic. Maybe this is the missing part you are feeling.

Ps.: About this,

For me, the post does neither address the question, nor the answer. What is the problem? What is the solution?

Funny, that for me it’s a complete post, does have the question, insight for a type of solution and provides enough context to spark the discussion on the topic.

I think that democratic processes should exist where this is power imbalance, exploitation and no safety release valve that lets the vulnerable people freely step away. E.g., we have democracy to prevent authoritarian rule, and because it’s hard to move country. We have workers co-ops and unions to prevent the power imbalance between bosses, customers and workers.

So, a co-op of taxi drivers makes sense to me, because all of those conditions exist: Uber is dominant, they own the two-sided market so it’s more difficult for customers or drivers leave, and the drivers are exploited because they have few alternatives.

That’s pretty much it. Not all products needs to be a coop. But most products would benefit from a coop. I can give you one example, imagine if all the coffee shops in your region decide to coop, they organize their prices, decide who gets which special beans, and create an app that allows the customer to not only know what kind of special coffee they have to offer. Or even provide a better engagement with it’s customer base.

(And remove the “coffee shop owner” which is usually the guy who never had brewed a cup of coffee in their life)

On the fediverse, we already have co-ops where each user gets a stake in the rules, moderation, etc. We also have instances that are run as more of a benevolent dictatorship, but where everyone is there freely. We have single-user instances too. To me, this is the best of all worlds, because everyone can choose the governance model that suits them, and we can all co-operate together.

That’s the point. Governance for the people who use the tool and the factories apps…

This is where my opinion depends on what you’re arguing for. Is your suggestion to tie the governance to the protocol itself, or to push for more co-operatively run instances and software? If the latter, I’m all for it :) but if it’s the former, to me that’s a step backward, because we’re placing a checkpoint on who can join the network that removes the safety release valves and pushes people into a democratic system that they might not agree with.

The later, more instances to be able to help each other. For example, why not the instances about art in your region and the theater be organized by both groups combined? And if this works, why not add the Anime folks. If there is trouble, split the parts that aren’t following the “bigger” side, and both can co-exist.

For me, this the essence of the argument. But I’m not quite sure what the keys are to: what power and influence do they unlock? Open source makes sense to me because the people doing the work have a say in what’s happening. I’m nervous to give power to users, who are not doing work, over volunteers, who are doing work. But then, when there is funding involved, I think that naturally leads to more users having more influence, because they can always take it away if their priorities are not met. See Snowdrift Co-op for instance. To me, the biggest solution is finding a way to fund open source projects directly from users.

Think the key as a “group of people with the same intention”.

A single instance of Mastodon alone won’t do a thing. But the whole group would be able to make a difference. Or Piefed, I want to have an instance at home for my friends to organize the D&D games for example. This instance alone won’t solve the D&D as a whole thing, but would allow for other groups to organize, maybe. (I’m stretching the point here)

Looks like I broke the RSS xD
I’ll fix it this weekend. Wasn’t the first, wont be the last.

Fixed, already added the link in the /blog.

EDIT: This is a infair comment. There is a better one.

Maybe your own software doesn’t have a soul then.
And this is fine. Not all software needs to fit in this coop way.

What if the people who use a piece of software, had ownership in the software. A simple (and possible example), instead of relying in a third party software for the organization of people in a given apartment hub, or group of houses. Have it’s own software build with free and open-source tools. And hosted in a community server.

So the people who use it, does have the governance over the software, and if needed to enhance, the same enhacement can be given back to the open-source community.