Comment on Big-tech is evil but could Fediverse benefit from more small/medium for-profit companies?

LandedGentry@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

• Lumberjacked@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  You could do a for profit without investors. Any profit goes back to employees and paying users. Make it the operating agreement from the get go and no one could come in.

  Non profit in many places means you can’t sell a service. So you rely on donations. Which means you’re constantly asking for donations.

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  • LandedGentry@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    [deleted]

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    • SMillerNL@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      FIFA is a non-profit. Doesn’t exactly make them a good organisation.

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    • m_f@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Even non-profits aren’t immune to hostile takeovers. OpenAI is a for-profit company controlled by a non-profit, and that hasn’t stopped them from turning into something indistinguishable from a regular for-profit company. They’ve also been making noise about abandoning the fig leaf of the non-profit.

      Mozilla is another one where nominally they’re a for-profit controlled by a non-profit, but they’re now getting into shoving ads in your face just like any other company.

      It is harder to turn bad when you’re a non-profit but not impossible, without something of a poison pill that makes it unacceptable to for-profit takeovers.

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Valve is a company with $BILLIONS in revenue per year. The problem is the size of the corporations, not the profit incentive.

      I think we need more companies, but each of them smaller in headcount and customer base. For the Fediverse, this is perfect.

      To illustrate the point: all I really want from Communick is to get to 10000 paying customers. That would bring $300k in revenue, I would be able to draw a good salary from it (still less than any drone from Big Tech makes though), make good on my pledge to give 20% of profits to developers, hire some people to help with moderation and so on…

      Notice that 10 thousand users is less than 1% of the current amount of people in the Fediverse, if we had half of the users interested in this model, it would mean that there is room for (at least!) another 50 small businesses like mine, which is more than enough to have a healthy competition around.

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    • Lumberjacked@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Yeah but Valve is centralized ownership still. One guy has majority and that makes a difference. A coop could be customer led from get go. 51% customers 49% employees or something like that.

      The point being if you structure it as for profit you can charge for things and build a good product. You can make rules that says 100% of the profits have to be redistributed and no one can change that. It’s how many farm co-ops work.

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  • avidamoeba@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I think there’s a difference in definitions, as well as difference between non-profit/not-for-profit and charities. As far as I know what your described is a non-profit and a non-profit can sell services.

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