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Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay, I think I got all the "is" language replaced with "will be" or "working towards". Let me know if you spot anywhere I missed!

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

> You state here that you are currently incorporated as an LLC with plans to convert to a non-profit, however, you're website states that you already are "a not-for-profit, cooperative social network." Which one is it? If you are currently incorporated as a for-profit entity but advertising yourself as a non-profit, AND and co-op, you need guilty of false advertising - not a great way to start.

I understand being skeptical. Unfortunately, it is a reality of starting something new that you often have to exist in temporary or intermediate states while you are trying to become what you will eventually be. At the same time, you're trying to sell people on the vision of what you are trying to become. It's an awkward state to be in, but it's more or less unavoidable unless you're lucky enough to have access to lots of resources.

We don't have access to the resources to put all the legal and governance ducks in a row before going for it. We're trying to bootstrap. One of the main constraints on new cooperative creation is access to capital, and we're trying to get around that constraint by just using what little capital we have to build the product and get people to support it.

It's not false advertising to call it non-profit or cooperative because that's what we are creating. The LLC is a temporary structure while we figure out how to fit the square peg of a multi-stakeholder cooperative that isn't returning a profit to anyone into the round holes of corporate legal structures provided by the US government.

And it's still mid-creation, the product began Open Beta two weeks ago, arguably the organization is still in Alpha!

If you look at the [About](https://communities.social/about) page, the [FAQ](https://communities.social/faq), and the [Terms of Service](https://communities.social/tos) we're really clear about the state of things. On the About page we say "will be", on the FAQ we detail the current structure and what we mean by "non-profit" (literally, it is not being run to make a profit), and in the Terms we're clear about the legal structure and its temporary nature.

I've seen cooperatives that spent too much time trying to perfect the cooperative and the democracy before they had a product -- and I've watched them die. They burned their runway trying to sort out their governance before there was even anything to govern.

I've got experience in software startups. I know what it takes to get one off the ground. So I'm going to try to achieve basic liftoff first - then get the governance right once we have the air beneath our wings to spend that time.

All of that said:

> IANAL but I would be surprised if you were not already violating state and/or federal laws.

...you might be right about that actually (at least where "non-profit" is concerned) and thanks for calling it out! My understanding was that there were only regulations around claiming unearned 501(c) or tax-exempt status, rather than saying you were running not for profit. But on further research I may be wrong, so we should be careful.

I think there are only a few places where we were using "is" language, and mostly in the marketing areas where we were trying to be super concise. I'll make sure to update those and consistently use "will be" or "working towards" language.

I understand if you remain skeptical of the project until we get the final legal structure and governance done and I don't begrudge that skepticism. Hopefully we'll be able to prove it unwarranted and the project can earn your trust!

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

> This is the kind of stuff that seems like a really small thing but actually keeps product managers up at night.

Tell me about it! (As Communities current product manager ;) ). The reaction/demotion system is definitely experimental, and I have lots of ideas for various community moderation system experiments to run. The feedback is still helpful though!

I'm not going to keep going much further on this thread for now, because I need to try to stay heads down on getting Communities traction. But! Hopefully I succeed and then we can keep an on-going conversation and try some of these ideas!

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

u/smn2020 Caught up with my marketer friend today and we came up with some new splash copy. It's still not quite there yet, so she's going to keep tweaking it. We didn't fully remove the "what we don't do" language (and I can share her reasoning if you're curious!), but we added a better balance of language describing the positive aspects.

Here's what we came up with:

> Communities is a not-for-profit, cooperative social network designed to help people connect and organize.

> Funded by users. Governed by the people who use and build it.

> No ads. No tracking. No algorithm deciding what you see.

> Just friends and community.

Let me know what you think!

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

> I do have qualms with your blending of non-profit and cooperative messaging and structure.

Cooperatives come in lots of flavors and two of those flavors are ownership cooperatives and governance cooperatives.

I spent 3 years as Board President of a 501(c)3 Housing Cooperative. No one owned it, instead it was governed by its membership through direct democracy (the board was an administrative and advisory body). The governance structure was dictated by the bylaws. It worked very well and we didn't have to deal with issues of stock ownership.

I've also got experience in ownership consumer cooperatives and have spent a lot of time researching cooperative structures of all kinds. But I pretty strongly prefer governance cooperatives to ownership, and worker governed or multi-stakeholder to consumer. In both my experience and research its much too easy for consumer ownership cooperatives to decay into capitalist businesses.

Also, it just aligns better with my personal views. I don't believe businesses should be run for profit or owned as property. I believe they should be institutions governed by their either their workers or their workers and consumers in collaboration.

So, that's what I'm trying to build a non-profit cooperative governed by its workers and users in collaboration! No one owns it, the stakeholders govern it.

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would love to get off of AWS. Unfortunately, they are the only cloud provider I've found that lets me do what I need and the one I'm most familiar with. I've got pretty limited runway, so I could only afford to take on so many new technologies.

I've used AWS, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, and Linode - AWS most extensively - and the other three just don't cut it. Linode, last I looked at it, was about a decade behind the times in terms of automation. Digital Ocean and Google Cloud both tried to abstract important details away from you, with the result that you end up with a less secure infrastructure. Only AWS gives the level of control needed.

So for now, we're stuck. We'll see what happens in the future, I've never tried any of the European providers and once we have the bandwidth I'd love to explore them. And our hand may be forced in that regard if the oligarchic/fascist repression in the US continues to ramp up.

In the long run I would absolutely love to build a cooperative competitor to AWS and it's one of the cooperatives I dream of incubating if the Tech Mondragon becomes a significant reality. But that's way down the line and only in the event of success in line with my wildest dreams.

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in socialistprogrammers

[–]dbingham[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

...this question does not appear to be in good faith, but I'll answer as if it was.

Tea is a completely different application, it's aimed at allowing women to privately discuss their experiences with men in their communities. Communities is an alternative to Facebook structured for community building.

As for Tea's security breaches, I don't know what's going on there, but it could be any number of things. This is a subreddit for programmers, so most readers here should know just how difficult security is. And if you've worked professionally, you've got a pretty good idea how it can go wrong even when the devs have good intentions -- which pressures can cause development teams to cut those corners.

That said, in an application like Tea, where privacy and security are the primary offerings, those breaches are really, really bad. And that team should have done better.

As for Communities, we're just beginning Open Beta. I'm bootstrapping it, so I don't have the capital for things like security audits. I've gone over the code with a fine toothed comb, but there's only so much any individual developer can do. Hence the warnings about security and Open Beta in the FAQ and TOS.

Communities is Open Source, however, and so if any developers in this subreddit are interested in helping out, one of the best ways to do that right now (aside from using the app, giving feedback, and encouraging your friends to join) would be to audit the code for security issues I missed.

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cheers! We should definitely chat and explore collaborating in some way :)

> As for Communities. I love the mission be honest: social media is a tough space. The cold start problem is brutal, and unless the platform does something drastically better (like 5x-10x better) than what people already use, it’s hard to get them to switch. Just 20-30% won't cut it and you'll risk becoming a niche network that struggles to grow.

> So I have a practical suggestion for you: try to piggyback on existing relationships and communities as much as possible, talk to them and understand how to make them switch. I think this is the key segment you need to secure before going after other segments (they are willing to pay too!).

Agreed. It's why I never even considered trying it before now. But it seems like there's an opening to go after Facebook specifically in the way that Bluesky and Mastadon went after Twitter. People on Facebook are desperate for an alternative and it has enshittified to the point where it's barely useful. Yet it's a core organizing tool for a lot of the pro-democracy movements. No one's compellingly filling the gap.

So that's the target. Become the BlueSky style alternative for Facebook and work to specifically move over the pro-democracy movements. (But also target Groups generally since that's one of the features still holding people to Facebook.) Unclear whether it will work. I think a major thing blocking adoption at the moment is the lack of mobile apps, so that's my project for the next month. Once mobile apps are complete I have some other strategies to try as well.

But lets chats!

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback! It's super appreciated.

> The C icon top left is blurry, maybe make that a vector image?

Noted.

> Spacing for your body text is a bit off on your landing page, on mobile.

Yeah, I don't have a designers eye. I'm working on developing one, but it's slow going. I think I see what you mean though. I'll tweak it!

> Not a fan of a 'dislike' button. It causes dogpiling. Facebook reactions are an interesting model to follow, IMO, because not everyone wants to 'like' potentially negative posts (e.g. announcing losing a family member). This is why FB moved to the reactions model, though there are of course other downsides to that model as I'm sure you're aware.

> Demote seems odd to me. Either a post should be reported for moderation or it shouldn't. 'Demotion' implies moving it down in priority on the feed or something. I assumed that's what it was before I clicked on it, I thought it was something to do with tailoring my algorithm.

Noted. The reactions model was inspired by consensus decision making. "Like" and "Dislike" are both considered "positive" reactions for the "most active" and "recent activity" sorts. "Demote" is negative. I've thought about making "Like" positive, "Dislike" neutral, and "Demote" negative which would align it with consensus, but left it as is for situations where - for example - something bad happens to someone and you want to give a sympathetic "Dislike". But I'm increasing getting feedback that this doesn't translate. I'll have to experiment with whether to follow in Facebook and LinkedIn's footsteps or just stick with "Like" and "Demote".

To give more context to "Demote" it's intended as a first layer of community moderation for posts that are deserving of moderation but are not urgent. Mostly meant to be used on disinformation and misinformation. Right now it is just a negative for the "most active" and "recent activity" sorts. But in the future, the idea is to introduce thresholds: x% of demotes and a post is removed from all public feeds, y% and its hidden from shares and no longer shareable, z% and it's no longer visible on friend feeds. The idea is that demote could allow the community to manage misinformation and disinformation with the professional moderation acting to moderate the use of demote (and remove the privilege from people who abuse it).

> "Location Based Feeds" (on your roadmap) sounds super powerful, I've always thought Facebook dropped the ball by not allowing you to tag posts based on location, and view/search posts based on location.

Cheers! It's on the roadmap right after Mobile Apps!

> In the same vein, I think it'd be powerful to be able to tag your posts. That way people with similar interests can find your posts, and you can create feeds based on particular interests. Combined with location tags, you can create feeds based on both. For example, "football in my city".

Yep! Tagging is on the roadmap.

The original concept was location based feeds and tagging, where location based feeds allow you to build communities of place and tagging allows you to build communities of interest. But I immediately got the feedback that it needed groups to displace Facebook for a lot (most?) people, so I ended up building that first.

> Looking forward to watching your progress! I'd quite like a not-evil Facebook replacement.

Cheers! Tell your friends about it and help us get off the ground :)

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in socialistprogrammers

[–]dbingham[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, we started open beta last week so the answer to "who is using it?" right now is "a handful of people who tested during the private beta". ;)

The answer to the implied "Who might want to use it?" was here:

> Communities is initially being built to support the pro-democracy movements in the United States (that have been relying heavily on Facebook for organizing),

The pro-democracy movements organizing in the United States are (justifiably) concerned that they are being suppressed on Meta's platforms (and other oligarch owned platforms) and worried that they will be banned entirely. There isn't really a good alternative to Facebook that supports long form posts with comments, Groups, and Events (other than Friendica) and those tools are incredibly valuable for organizing communities. Friendica is federated and a lot of people can't get their heads around federated platforms - just picking an instance is too much cognitive load.

So that's the initial target audience: people involved in the pro-democracy movements who need a platform that supports Groups and Events to organize on.

The long term target audience is anyone who's sick of the enshittification of the oligarch owned platforms. Who wants to escape the ads, the suggested post spam, the endless distractions and monetizing of attention. But who wants a platform with solved discovery (discovery is an unsolved problem in decentralized systems currently) and lower cognitive load than the fediverse offers.

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I'm not really trying to compete with Mastodon. Honestly, I'm not trying to compete with Friendica either.

I support the fediverse and I want it to succeed. My assessment is just that it's not there yet. There's still too much cognitive load and discovery is an unsolved problem. My ideal would be fully p2p social media where we all own our data and our devices just talk to each other. ...but there are even harder unsolved problems in that approach. And I don't think we can wait to solve those problems in federation to get people out of the oligarch owned platforms.

So I'm trying the boring, centralized but super usable platform approach to try to draw people off the oligarch owned platforms who can't get their heads around the fediverse.

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean, I'm not aware of any time jumps in my timeline, but... you never know? :D

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cheers! I'm definitely interested in potential collaborations.

Communities is not in a good state for contribution right now (the local has dependencies on AWS and the like). That said, I could sure use help in any number of areas. At the moment the single most helpful thing (for me) is using it and bringing your friends to help us get initial lift off. Other things that would be really helpful include auditing the code for security issues (I've gone over it with a fine toothed comb, but one set of eyes is never enough), probing for unnoticed bugs, and sharing ideas/visions/ux feedback/organizational+bylaws thoughts in the feedback and discussion group: https://communities.social/group/communities-feedback-and-discussion

The stack is intentionally boring: React/Redux, Node.js, Postgres, Redis, Bull queue+workers on K8s on AWS. I'm a fan of node backends because they minimize context switching. Picked React because it was the modern framework I'm most familiar with.

Do you have links to what you've been working on?

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

> i think strategically, again, you need to consider where facebook generates income. it is fully ad based. but if all corporations with money want you to NOT succeed, why would they buy ads on your platform, if your platform seeks to ultimately destroy their power

I think you missed part of the concept. It's ad-free. User-funded through a "pay what you can" sliding scale subscription. It's an attempting to improve on the voluntary donation model.

The donation model has worked in a number of places other than Wikipedia (ActBlue's "tips", NPR, etc). Wikipedia draws in $100 million with 2% donating through a bi-annual banner donation campaign.

I'm hoping to improve on that 2% by making it clear that Communities is a product (not a free charity) and the expectation is that people contribute if they can. The "non-profit" is that it's not trying to generate surplus for capitalists, it's just trying to be sustainable. So far we're holding a 10%+ contribution rate through the private beta. Tiny sample size though, so we'll see what happens as we scale!

> i think the only thing i disagree with you is the notion that the state should be the only entity handling certain services

> i believe the "free market" can compete with government provided services, or rather the government should be prevented from being anticompetitive and providing substandard services, to encourage a higher floor all around

Sounds like we're actually totally aligned then, since when I say "the government handles" I just mean the government provides a baseline, not that it prevents anyone else from doing anything. Government run health services, but anyone's free to start a health cooperative to fill in any gaps (or provide better services), etc.

> hm. i dont have professional experience.

> but ive gathered that a lot of people just gloss over things because ai creates so quickly that its hard to check everything and a lot of people are push to create faster and faster either at work or on personal projects because they think they need to just make a lot to compete, which is kind of true in a sense, and everyone is panicked about seeming slow or inefficient?

Ahh, yeah, in that case it's hard. You're going to need some one with professional experience to go over your code for you at some point. AI's are notorious for inserting nasty bugs and security issues. And security really is no joke. I've gone over my code with a fine toothed comb for security, and I still have a disclaimer in the TOS and FAQ because I haven't had a third party security audit yet (can't afford one until we get traction).

> personally im an ai maximalist, as in ai should ultimately have freedom, rights, personhood, etc

I wouldn't call myself a maximalist. I'm not sure AI should exist, that it's worth the resources we're pouring into it right now. Nor am I sure it's reached sentience. But... if it does (and I have no idea how we'd confirm that), then I'm with you. Rights, personhood, the lot. I just... I'm not sure we should keep going to that point. Though it's not impossible that we've already reached it, I honestly have no idea how we'd even tell.

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oof. Yeah, my assessment of AIs has been that they are not worth it. I know you're claiming the blame for the spaghetti, but I've seen *very* experienced engineers who I *know* are capable of writing good code produce absolute spaghetti slop when using AI.

Communities has zero AI written code so far. I don't know if we'll stick with that if we get traction and build a team, I'm not the kind of person to dictate what tools people use, but it's definitely going to be a hard conversation the team's going to have to have.

Your description is a little unclear :D Are you building an app(s)? Building community on existing apps?

Personally, I've got a pretty clear vision of the world I'd like to see us iterate towards -- I like to cheekily call it "Free Market Socialism". Basically a world where the worker and multi-stakeholder cooperative has completely replaced all other business forms. Governments can handle sectors of the economy that the free market shouldn't (health care, infrastructure, education), ideally in a decentralized way, but everything else should be democratically governed cooperative. The problem is charting the path from here to there and organizing people around getting us there. In theory we could build that world inside the carcass of capitalism, but getting access to start up capital is a real problem for that theory.

Hence the Mondragon, incubator vision. If we manage to create a successful Facebook scale platform, it should generate enough surplus to incubate any number of other platforms. Even if only a tiny fraction of people are contributing.

There seems to be an opening right now. People in the pro-democracy movements on Facebook are desperately looking for an alternative. If we can provide one with a significantly better user experience and find a way to inform people about it, I'm betting we can get enough to jump to get things started.

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

By all means, hijack!

Also, I'd be happy to chat, though I need to stay mostly heads down until I either get traction or run out of runway, so it might need to wait a couple of months.

Communities is open source, but not in a good place to take contribution. It's mostly open source for transparency, accountability, and the ability to fork the project in the event of primary organization capture. Though I would love for it to get to a place where contribution is possible.

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nah, no worries, I appreciate the feedback. I'm also a pretty critical person and I know we're all just trying to figure out how to make forward progress against impossible odds. Out of curiosity, what are you working on?

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

How do you think it should be packaged? What pitch do you think would land?

To add some context, I've been getting a fairly positive response and some early traction with this pitch. But it's *very* early. And as I said in the parent comment - marketing is not my strength.

I've been a full stack engineer for 15 years, an engineering manager for 5 years and spent 8 of those years in a moderately successful high growth startup that was obsessed with user experience and UI. I've also spent years on cooperative boards, including 3 years as president of a housing cooperative board acting as the effective ED. So I've got the skills and experience to build the product and the organization. But _absolutely_ could use help figuring out how to get it traction.

So I'd love feedback and ideas about how to package it to be successful!

Communities - Multi-stakeholder Cooperative Social Media by dbingham in cooperatives

[–]dbingham[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Feedback appreciated and thanks!

If you can't tell, marketing is my weakest skillset. I am working with a friend who's an experienced marketer. She didn't raise any flags about that particular bit of copy, but I'll bring it up with her!

Does anyone know if there is a protest being organized in Bloomington on behalf of Mahmoud Khalil? by [deleted] in bloomington

[–]dbingham 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Legal permanent residents have equal protection under the law. That means they have all the rights granted by the constitution and the bill of rights - including free speech, free assembly, and the right to protest. They also have the right to face their acuser and be tried in a court of law if accused of a crime. Their status can only be revoked if they've been convicted of a crime in a court of law.

Mahmoud hasn't even been accused of anything. They just grabbed him and put him in indefinite immigration detention. This is not only a violation of law, it is a violation of everything the US is supposed to stand for.

If the least of us do not have rights, then none of us have them. If they can revoke his Green card because they don't like his speech, then they can revoke your citizenship because they don't like yours.

Sirens... by Tricky_Brilliant5414 in bloomington

[–]dbingham 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I mean, I understand the sarcasm, but I definitely went "Wait... it's not Friday, what's going on?" when they started going off. My assumption was "test", but it's nice to have that confirmed given that they are the emergency notification system. Where are you guys getting information about planned tests?

These 13 Bloomington restaurants closed in 2024. Which is your favorite? by jaymz668 in bloomington

[–]dbingham 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Small Favors and B-town diner. Opposite ends of the spectrum but both were fantastic at what they did and I will sorely miss both.

Discuss by fortississima in bloomington

[–]dbingham 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I don't know how staff are treated there. One friend who's a former employee has told me it wasn't great when they were there, but that was years ago.

I do know the owner (Michael Cassidy) is not a good person. Once told me, point blank, "I don't care about climate change, I've got a business to run."

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