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Comment by decasia | Hacker News Reader

I would love to pay for social software on a coop model (like a food coop, etc) — we would be "members" and, theoretically, we pay a small monthly fee that covers the costs of hosting and platform development. I've tried to think about what I would want that to look like — spoiler, something different than the model of "posting + reactions" that is so familiar from twitter+fb — but then when I think about the barriers to entry for a project like that, even though the technological part might not be that difficult (assuming it was Less Than Web Scale), I just give up hoping for it.

I've been following a lot of the bluesky + mastodon stuff but I don't like that their basic model of social interaction is just a clone of Twitter.

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This is precisely https://social.coop, of which I am part of, except for the "not being Mastodon" bit :)

Governance happens on Loomio, which is a forum tailored for community decision making, but the main platform that coop members get access to is a Mastodon instance for now. We are experimenting with Bonfire, which is more flexible and might end up providing a solid base for federated apps in general.

Let me know if you have any questions!

I can't remember the name of it, but over a decade ago I saw something like this - it was a single Linux server shared by (I think) hundreds of people. Really trying to do the multi-user paradigm. They advertised it as a private kind of social network, it was invite-only and I think you had to pay to help keep the server lights on.

Hopefully by posting something incorrect, A Person On The Internet Who Knows Better will come along and provide the correct details. :)

Maybe SDF?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_Syste...

https://sdf.org/

Tilde.club nearly meets your definition.[1] It's at least 1 decade and 15 days old, but it appears it's open to join for anyone.[2]

[1] https://tilde.club/ [2] https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...

The first link you put gives me a security warning so I didn't click through. But the medium article would suggest that this is the one!

That can just be a forum - a forum I've been a member of for more than 20 years has been run by the members since 2010 [1], is registered as a co-operative/community benefit society in the UK and funded by voluntary memberships or donations, with members voting annually to elect people to positions required to run it.

A good chunk of those have been part of the same community on a newsgroup, then on a company-owned forum which got shuttered, then on a forum instance set up by a user who didn't want to run it any more after 6 years. The tech and platforms are ephemeral, always have been.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RLLMUK

This is called a forum.

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