Opensource

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

[^1]: read this community as a group of people, and not as a discord server, neither as a community on piefed. This is physical people touching grass and discussin.