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

@operand @kissane I caught only a small slice of it myself; I know of a few other Dutch social media networks that I wasn't on (different demographic) and I know very little about the networks that existed in other countries, other than that there were many.

@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...