I am a big fan of doing this kind of thing with promox! I run labwc and pipewire into apps!
Because I wanted the smoothest possible graphics while remoting into my VMs, I went full into lightweight/minimal wayland, which was frustrating at first but it's worth it.
I run it on my lenovo laptop as my mobile development machine and works great!
Even better for graphical smoothness, I discovered that my laptop supports GPU SR-IOV, which took some effort, but now my VMs can benefit from GPU pass through without losing my host display! I am most pleased with this more than any other customization I've done to my dev box.
The craziest thing is that I get more battery life RDP'ing into windows 11 on my local proxmox VM than I did when I ran it on the bare metal. Like 8-10 hours instead of 6-8 doing the same dev tasks.
Anyway, I am glad to meet a kindred spirit! Be well.
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 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?
Tons of people hate their HOAs and apartment managers. Because they lose control over their own living space.
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.
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.
If anything was a better example maybe it would be religions? If someone has other ideas they can split off and seek similarly minded followers. But even so, the person that has the physical space to meet or the person that can do the sermons, or whoever has the connections and money is going to be controlling it. And even if it is run by democratic vote, you still have the problem of the tyranny of the majority, and your option is to leave and start your own church if you disagree. But few have the ability and resources to do so.
Actually, that sounds a lot like linux distros! Which open source already facilitates, yes? And most users just want to use it, not work on it.
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.
Sorry, I am all over the place. Maybe this is too much for me and I should let others sort it out.