Just like “this is the year of the Linux Desktop”?

I’d love to have an open non-profit alternative to Google’s productivity suite, but realistically it’s very hard to host those things outside a traditional for profit business. Building the open source software is the easy part, and has been done already. The hard parts are things like email deliverability, and getting people to pay for what’s typically a free ad-supported service.

Nonprofits aren't a panacea here - I remember a piece recently on how their executive salaries are sometimes very high and detract from the nonprofit's original purpose.

Its not just social media. Search is also extremely important. Whether alternatives are open source or commercial it is not so important. Certainly good quality open source solutions would force commercial enterprise to "work for the money" rather than extract rents. What is important is to outlaw practices relating to data collection and targeted ads, and break down monopolistic conditions.

Basically you want a healthy mix of commons infrastructure and private enterprise that respects common values and promotes innovation. Its not rocket science but of-course decades-long inaction makes it feel like having to move mountains.

I've thought along the same lines. I currently have some personal projects going in this direction. My vision is to create a set of tools that would allow you to set up a micro infrastructure to self-host all of these services on any cloud/hosting provider with a reasonable API.

I have professional experience with all of the technologies involved and the biggest hurdles are getting time to work on it and dealing with the absolute horror that is HTML/CSS/Mobile. Once I can get enough built I can farm that out to someone else, though. In the meantime I'm still hoping to win the lottery while not wasting any money on tickets :)

How do you run essentially a commercial business as non-profit? Hosting has cost inherent and those have to be paid for. Either by advertising which won't work in this case or by subscriptions or donations. And I don't think there is enough donations...

The time is right for devs to work for free? Seems unlikely..

I suspect you're not saying this in the obvious literal sense. Signal is a nonprofit that provides video and chat you can attach files to and there are various other open protocols that have existed for decades with open-source clients you can use to hook into the network.

If you want one producer to many consumers, many producers to one consumer publishing platforms, those also exist. PBS and NPR are nonprofit platforms anyone can consume from and anyone can attempt to publish to, but they have to adhere to basic content-worthiness and editorial standards.

What I think you really want, and why YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok became so popular in the first place, is a platform to which anyone can publish anything, provided it isn't illegal or offensive to the platforms' more limited but not completely non-existent content guidelines, and some sort of promotional feed for that content gets directly pushed to consumers to facilitate discoverability of producers who are not already famous by some other means.

File storage seems largely orthogonal from the consumer point of view. People can already put more video than they can watch in a lifetime, more text than they can read in a lifetime, on disks they personally own. It's the producers of regularly-uploaded, new multimedia streaming content that need someone else's disk space to serve their own content from. The dilemma seems obvious here. If you place no restrictions other than it can't be illegal on what anyone can serve to others, you've promised the world effectively infinite disk space. How can a nonprofit do that, keeping in mind that nonprofits need to have some sort of mission that puts them in a legal category making them eligible to incorporate as a nonprofit in the first place? For PBS and NPR, they serve an educational mission that qualifies them under 501(c)(3). But in order to do that, they need to have an editorial standard. They have to publish content that is actually educational.

I'm actually curious now how Signal qualifies, as Signal Foundation is also a 501(c)(3). The IRS gives the following guideline:

> The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.

Pro Publica's database lists them under the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities category "Community Improvement, Capacity Building / Business and Industry" (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...), but this isn't a legal category.

I guess ask a lawyer, which I am not, but I suspect a prospective YouTube/TikTok replacement trying to convince the IRS they deserve to be exempt from taxes is going to have a tough time.