Comment by hkt

I've looked at this for years, and have my (basically defunct) attempt at it over at mutual.email - the idea was customer owned email (+etc) service.

The main idea was to make a service covering people's "workspace" needs (comms, documents, collaboration etc) which would place things like data governance under end user control, mostly on the assumption that given the choice, people would never agree to having their data mined by eg, Google.

In practice I wasn't really ready for it, but doing this kind of thing as a co-operative society with worker or member ownership is a fabulous idea and one I'd love to see come to fruition.

A lot of the pitfalls I've seen from surveying not just my own attempt but other people's is that getting your initial collaborators on board is hard, and keeping a culture that promotes change rather than stagnation is even harder. Lots of coops in the email and hosting space show this: they'll sweat hardware way past when it is economical or sensible to do so, and are generally averse to raising cash to invest in the business. Customers go to them and pay a premium because they want something "ethical", which lets them off the hook for being uncompetitive. The spiral continues, tightening until the service is so poor and prices so high that literally nobody wants it anymore. My suggestion is whatever you do, avoid that situation: investment starvation kills coops.