Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@kissane Every time I think about this sort of thing, I keep returning to the model of an old Dutch social media site called Clubs.nl, from the pre-Facebook era.

It was run very poorly, but despite that it seemed to have more or less nailed the model: you had 'clubs', many of which were publicly indexed and joinable (with varying permission/invite/role settings), every club was its own little island, and all interactions happened within a club - it had a forum, photo gallery, news section, etc.

The only 'profile' you had was a username and, I believe, a list of the (public) clubs you were a part of, if you enabled that. No personal 'wall' or 'feed'. Private messages were limited to originating from within a club, IIRC.

It worked really well to find people with similar interests, even if you started without knowing anyone on the site, and clout-chasing was functionally impossible; there was no leaderboard to get on top of, no feed to have your posts show up on.

(Unlike eg. Reddit, there was no 'upvoting', no 'frontpage' with 'popular' posts, etc., and clubs had a fair amount of freedom in what the design looked like)

@mjg59 I suspect that the primary benefit would be a far leap in terms of WINE compatibility/coverage, maybe better development/testing tools, and not a whole lot else.

@SnoozyRests@cyberpunk.lol Right; I can only speak for my own discussions, which were often trying to encourage people to consider a FOSS donation model *instead of* a proprietary payment scheme, usually people who were already pretty okay financially and could easily afford to take that risk. Hence why I'm considering them something different :)

It seems likely that broader, more public discussions around funding OSS are closer to mutual aid, as you describe, because they often revolve around people who are *already* doing a lot of work for the community.

(I do personally consider FOSS to itself be a form of mutual aid in some ways, though only one of many, and certainly not a magical solution to all ills)

@SnoozyRests@cyberpunk.lol Kind of related: I've had *many* discussions with people over the years about donation-based funding for open-source projects. Almost every single one ran aground on this exact same assumption, or some version of it.

"How do we make sure that nobody is freeloading?"

"There would be lots of people who wouldn't donate, this would never work to pay the bills!"

And so on, and so forth. I'd try explaining to them that it doesn't actually *matter* whether everyone donates, it's not like selling something, just enough donations need to be made to cover the costs.

I was mostly met with complete bafflement, and people having a lot of trouble internalizing this idea, often just responding with "let's agree to disagree" or repeating arguments that assumed everybody would need to donate, despite what I'd just explained.

This is of course very different from mutual aid, given that it was often about donations to people who *could* find other ways to pay the bills (and just wouldn't be able to work on the open-source stuff then), but the dynamics are strikingly similar...

Something that frustrates me is that political discourse and action largely sorts into two buckets:
1. "Everything is fucked and we can't fix it anyway!"
2. "I'm doing my part already by being involved in <some local thing>, what more are you expecting?"

And they are both wrong but for different reasons; "everything is fucked" is a reasonable feeling to have but ultimately doesn't reflect what can *actually* be accomplished with the right organizing, and "I'm already doing my part, I can't do more" is *also* a reasonable feeling but ignores that the idea of a "first step towards progress" only works if you acknowledge that there are many more steps to follow!

And because the second category never ends up achieving large-scale change (because they consider the work done after the first step), the first category never experiences what can be achieved, and so the first category of folks doesn't get involved, and that then causes the second category of folks to keep feeling overextended, and on and on it goes in a circle.

The actual solution here is to start small, with an accessible first step, *and* treat that as a stepping stone towards larger, overarching organization, where you constantly keep pushing for that larger change (even if you personally are not the one doing the work there!).

But both categories of people will tend to reject this idea (often implicitly rather than explicitly), for a different reasons.

How on earth do we resolve this?