I’m not sure if I follow the question, let’s me try to understand.

If you are talking about a self-hosting. This isn’t the governance, this is the “deployment” of a software. I know that I talk heavily on this point on the essay, but the focus is regarding that self host is a act on the individual level, while governance is about who use the system and have a say on it.

I’ll grab a example, (I’ll avoid the Uber cliche, but maybe I need to take this one)

Imagine a N-unit building, cooperative software replaces the landlord with a transparent governance dashboard (I’m assuming that all residents own each of the units in this building). Residents propose maintenance tasks (e.g., roof leaks) and collectively vote on fund allocation using a one-unit-one-vote system. The software automatically tracks each unit’s financial contributions, schedules shared laundry slots via a consensus calendar, and logs inspection reports viewable by all. When a major expense arises, the platform facilitates a binding poll, calculates each owner’s share, and executes payment only when the quorum is met, ensuring every resident has equal say over their shared physical assets.

This is the example of governance that I was talking about. The people who use and own the building have a say on it. When something arives everyone have a way to discuss and talk, using the software as a tool to support then. Self-host is just the deployment for this system, but the focus is on the helping then to mitigate and ensure that everyone have a say in it.

I hope I got your point right.

It’s 4k words, it’s a critic with a good humor on it. But if you want a quick meme, sorry for the post. This is deeply related to program, and it’s a humorous post with a critic.

But looks like I’m off the target audience, which is on me for sure. But you can’t project your own lack of reading on the post.

edit, Did you read the post in this community before going to the post? Did you read the post? Looks like you may be missing, so I may have been a little too harsh in my assumption, in this case, I’m sorry.

What wasn’t funny? The idea? The critic? The message? What was the issue?

The issue of content manipulation on non-Western platforms, such as TikTok—the international version of the Chinese platform Douyin, launched by ByteDance in 2017—is particularly important for understanding the influence of authoritarian regimes on online discourse in democratic societies such as Poland, where freedom of expression is constitutionally guaranteed and protected by law

Not sure if this is a good argument. Will read the report thought. But this phrase alone already looks bias as fuck.

The tech bros, or how I like to call the Theos online have a very misguided view, they have a specific interest, and a specific point. Usually to sell something.

From the last almost 15 years in the work I can say that maybe 10% of the products would ever need the JS framework of the day, mostly could be just a static page with some island of interactivity and some over the wire server render.

Things that we learned in 2000s with Ruby on Rails, and yet we reinvented the wheel.

So, it’s just sad to see the that current stat is yet broken, the tooling isn’t there, and worse, with AI we will have even more on this bad average.

Reading the other comments from you I notice this:

Japanese websites are really crap.

This is also racist.

Most news isnt static. Its an app and its a link embedded in an app. Blogs are not popular or relevant so idk why we are even talking about them. Substack has most of the market and its not a static site.

What? Do you have any data to support that? Because I do, “blog”, or any “news” page have way more traffic that you think about it, ask Cloudflare. And they are (the good ones) mostly static. So review you own concepts. Because you are wrong.

Ecommerce could not be static without major regressions to usablity.

Ask Amazon, most of their pages are static. They have island of interactivity, but the page for the product is static. So I think you have no idea what you are talking about.

I do live in a place with fast internet but we are talking about future and I think its stupid to build a future web for people who have slow internet when all the trends point to increasing internet speeds and connection around the world. I’m sure Africa doesnt want to finally get online and see everything be a static site.

You can run discord off a mobile data connection, when Africa builds out their Internet infra they will prefer services like discord over low bandwidth stripped down barebones services.

Man this is racist.

I can’t even talk on this topic, and I’m disgusted by your view. You have no idea what you are talking about.

the future web doesnt need to care about a 1mb page or a 10mb page. It only matters what you can do. Static site can do very little. You can’t have Lemmy as static site and Lemmy is an example of what I think future web could be. Open, interconnected, full of features and QoL. Lemmy gives you the things reddit tries to sell you.

Again you are wrong. And from the level of arguments provided, there is very little we can discuss.

Ps.: The world don’t care about the future, just check the price of RAM and we can talk about performance and use less and do more.

You are so wrong in this assumption. You barely touched the tip of the iceberg behind the small web movement.

Most of the static sites dont even need to be websites.

Are you suggesting that we shouldn’t have a page? That my blog isn’t important enough to exist?

The baker does not need a website.

What is the baker want’s to have a footprint online, maybe adding his working schedule? Maybe adding some historical information about the bakery? Or even information for requesting a special bakery? Isn’t this important?

Good website or bad website makes little to no difference. Its fine if they want to have a single static page with some info and a contact email im not saying they need anything good. But if every site was like that the internet would be worse than it is today.

Not sure if I follow this, but prefer the things stays the way they are. With pages using 10mb of frameworks without any need, with pages that loads a “loader” to load the page? Because this is the reason why the internet is ugly and broken.

If this is the case, I not only disagree with you, but I think you should experience the web, look for local pages and see how good or bad they can be.

Not sure if I can agree with that.

I would say that most of the internet is static by definition, even my blog is a static page with some CDN to make it faster. Most of the news pages are static, most of blogs should be static, most of the e-commerce should be static (the product page is static, not the purchase itself),

You may live in a place where internet is fast, but the majority of the world still breaths in 3G, with unstable connections and a miserable experience, so a 10mb page (I’m looking to you stupid Discord), could be a 1mb page, if wasn’t the bloat.

Jokes aside, XMPP could be something usefull for us in this day and age.

No bots allowed, only humans reading!

If you are talking semantic on the linguistic view… Yeah a lot of people can read, but can’t understand the other. If you are talking about html, you are also correct… You know what… You are just correct…

Dammit, this reply is already contracting myself!

I’ll heavily disagree with you.

All the modern web, using the modern frameworks, for the modern browser, that requires modern hardware, for a modern person… I hove you got the gist just by this phrase.

We can use less and still be usefull. Most of the web is static. The bakery don’t need to render a unique page for you just because you are from the same country. The same way that the news feed don’t need to regenerate the page every request, it can keep the old news there, until a new post arives, so clean the cache and hit a new one.

Notice that I’m not talking about pages like a mail application, figma or discord. I’m talking about the majority of the web, most are static, won’t need this.

Maybe would be a cool thing for ya to look on the small web moviment, it’s a pretty interesting idea, and can show that static pages can be cool, even knowing that they aren’t the “common place”.

You are so angry, do you want a hug?

My “to go” tool of the day is Alpine.js, fills a similar void, but the focus is on the client side, the botton idea is the same.

Fair point. But very little nitt-picky, right?

Depends on how much do you want to tradeoff on this.

The “easiest” way will always incur in some extra files, or unused shite. When I started, Bootstrap were the only acceptable thing, yesterday were Tailwind, and soon will be “what the AI spits on your face”…

So, a custom styling will always be “best options”, but this depends on your level of understanding on the web, and if CSS isn’t on your bucket list, leave for the ones that have this on the bucket list.

(Sorry for not having a silver bullet for this)

Are you the original author? If so, thanks, I enjoyed the post! It made me think. I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed but it returns 404 for me FYI.

Fixed the link. Also added the link in the /blog, so it’s easier to follow afterwards.
Thanks for the highlight.

I’ll try to help to convey my message, which for me is the important part. Your comment touches a fair lot of points, so I’ll try to break into smaller chunks to be easier to pipe this information.

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’ve faced something similar until I “decoupled” the governance from software, governance can apply to a wide range of topics, from safety, transport and software.

So keywords: “people” and “organization”

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?

An individual may lose control, but the community^[1] gains the control. And a community is composed of individuals. The group effort should benefit all the individuals in the community. Which also include the myself and you.

Tons of people hate their HOAs and apartment managers. Because they lose control over their own living space.

Let me start with: “HOA is a piece of shit.”

Why I dislike that much?
Because it’s easier to lose the sense of group when you have a dictator. HOA should have the voice of all, and the vote of all. And just by doing this a lot change. People start to understand each other and interact with each other. You may have your upper neighbor until you discover that the noise he makes every day as 6am is because he have a frail back and can’t sleep properly. This is how you create empathy, and why HOA should help to improve this people.

But the common HOA from the USA is a piece of garbage, reason why I rarely use the HOA, I use other terms, like “building community”, or “condominium”, just to stay as far as possible from the stigma, and the dictatorial ways of HOA.

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.

Cooperated software should serve people and it’s user. I’ll use a different example, which is a cliche, but helps to provide the initial insight, and we can move steps ahead later on (if the discussion moves on this way)

Uber. If the drivers have the governance over the app, we could skip the next few billions for the stupid Dora Khashowner, and give for the actual workers that does the job, in this case the drivers. The fares for the transport could even be reduced, since the people who use the app, and the people who provide the serve can get better agreements.

This is governance over the software.

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.

The user perspective nothing change, open the app. Do the stuff. Move on with their own lifes. Governance isn’t about the people who use, but the people who provide the source for it.

But this means that the people who use understands that each coin invested (spend) in the app goes to the right governance of the app, so the people that labour in it.

[religion]

I’ll not touch in this. No religion.

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.

This is a good point in the governance of the software development tools. But yet, this isn’t about the cooperative software.

Now on the meat of the cooperative.

Cooperative software ins’t about having a Uber app alone (still using the cliche example), but if Spain have it’s own Uber app, with the governance of the spanish drivers, with a open protocol, on open source code, Italy could have it’s own governance on the italian drivers, and both apps could work alongside, in a federated manner.

Did you notice? Open source, open protocol and federation. All working alongside, the next step is governance. The workers who provide the labour for the app to receive from the labour they already do.

Sorry, I am all over the place. Maybe this is too much for me and I should let others sort it out.

I just finished a 14h of work, debugging a very nasty bug in a production codebase for a billion dollar company. Imagine my own head at this exact moment. And yet, I want to make your mind to understand mine, when I can barely keep my eyes open.

Hope this helps :D

This is the point we disagree.

Small pockets of freedom can help, this won’t solve the global crisis, but will provide for the communities^[1] the needed force. Also, this can help groups to better organize and waste the least amount of money, effort and mind these.

Doing nothing right now will not change anything, and doing anything, even the small actions is the starting point for the next thing.

I’ll use myself as example, even knowing that this isn’t the perfect one, I started with the homelab because Amazon stole something from me, and I decided the that was enough. Now I can see that the hardware is cheap^[2], software is pretty much everywhere, federated or open-sourced (even better if it’s AGPL) and the next point is increase the range, for the smaller groups of people around the house, expanding for the neighbors to embark in this.