Comment by patcon
3 days ago
thanks for reading my message in good faith :)
as someone who co-founded a non-hierarchical community[1] (that's still going strong after a decade of weekly events), co-founded a worker cooperative[2], and experimented with sociocracy (and ALSO fully admit I failed out of it for reasons of misalignment!) -- i just think we owe it to ourselves to not discount that certain things XY can't be built under system Z. There are many ways possible where leaders don't always direct, or maybe only direct in short spurts. This all-or-nothing, lead-from-the-front, only-way-through-is-up perspective of getting things done (and working together), it's not the only way possible :) (respectfully!)
[2]: https://hypha.coop/
Looks like cool stuff, cheers. Always interesting to learn about new ways of organizing. The great thing is if the world is free enough we can all experiment with different structures if others will agree to experiment with us. But these do sound like they fall into the social side of the dichotomy of social focused versus product focused that I mentioned. The author of the post was trying to be in both at the same time which I think is hard to do.
(I love Hypha. I'm an early member of CoSocial which you folks kindly call home on the fediverse :) )
While I'm open to the idea that "certain things XY can't be built under system Z", I think that this feels like one of those things that should be no?
My question re: non-profit co-op-ey things is usually "can this thing run sustainably by enriching users" rather than the usual "can this thing run sustainably by enriching shareholders".
A super low-overhead social network for ecology feels like it could easily fit that bill. Lots of democratically run social networks running today to attest to that.