Honeywine
Chad LoderIt would be a good time to put serious financial backing behind Black-owned social media platform cooperatives. Yeah?
Joshua Lander@chadloder I don’t know. I think it’s always a good time to put serious financial backing into Black-owned businesses — but I fundamentally don’t think social media ought to be a business.
Kyle Marek-Spartz@chadloder @josh a cooperative isn't necessarily a business
@chadloder @kms I’m listening!
A Fox Called Spec 
@josh @chadloder I agree, it should not.
Social media will be the downfall of modern society.
@chadloder @spectrumfox corporate-owned social media, at least!
@josh Social media in general. Not everyone in the world should have a voice, and not everyone in the world should be listened to.
Igor Sovcik@josh @chadloder @spectrumfox and what do You think will be biggest use case of fediverse in near future. I can see clearly that for big corporate brands such as Coca Cola and so on would be beneficial to own for example mastodon server with its followers hosted on it. They could build whole user base, grant them benefits for membership and serve them ads without being dependant on 3.rd party. Or is this somehow preventable?
@josh I tend to agree we should support folks experimenting with new models, that's why I said "cooperatives" rather than companies or businesses!
@chadloder Black-owned, non-profit, renewably-powered data center full of SBCs (like Raspberry Pi) offering free Mastodon instances to members of the BIPOC community.
I would fund the hell out of that.
@chadloder (Hell, I would even volunteer to admin it.)
DDimetrodon@chadloder I'm looking forward to how that would turn the entire field on its head the way Rianna did to makeup with Fenty.
Shannon@chadloder Like Mastodon ones? Or something else?
littlegreyfish@chadloder social media should be owned by a diverse group. Different races, genders, religions, sexual orientations need to be represented.
@spectrumfox F
Hope you went out on your shield
Hope you went out on your shield
ChocoMingo@spectrumfox @chadloder On that note, we should also back platforms run by furries. As they say, "furries make the internets go"
Strigix@chadloder The Black Socialists of America twitter account has been working on a platform they call 'Dual Power' for a while, but I lost track of how things were going with it ages ago. IDK if it counts as social media, though; it's meant as a tool to assist with finding and building groups offline, from what I recall, rather than being a twitter or tumblr clone.
Jeff McNeill@chadloder pretty sure you don't need "serious financial backing, just a few instances and voluntary funding.
Space Karen@chadloder could you tell us more about this? Between Ngo being Musky's new BFF & you reporting a major birdsite data breach, I guess you flew to close to the sun
Jay Schwitzgebel@mburton @chadloder I’m unable to find an authoritative link about it, unfortunately. But I read elsewhere that someone was able to “scrape” Twitter handles with phone and email for user accounts that had their accounts set to be discoverable by phone # and/or email address, and the resulting scraped data is out on the dark web. Not quite a breach, perhaps. But also not benign.
@jayschwitz @chadloder thank you for the info!
Audrey Shipp@chadloder especially any that might be linked to the African continent or on the continent in the Black radical tradition of Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey.
christina b@chadloder
Our small team at https://www.socialroots.io/ has four women, (Serbian, Irish, Nigerian, and a New Zealander) and two guys (one Anglo, one Arab) and we are a cooperative.
Early funding for tech coops is nonexistent, so if you’re interested in helping coops we’d love to talk.
Strypey@christina
> Early funding for tech coops is nonexistent
It's frustrating to hear this is still the case, despite all the great work behind done by the folks at the PCC, the Open Cooperative, CTA etc. There were a few new startup funding projects being promoted at a couple of the conferences I went to in 2018/19, I'm guessing Covid has probably taken the wind out of their sails. Hopefully at least one of them will bounce back. Equity crowdfunding is the root we're looking at.
Yeah, equity crowdfunding might be a pathway for a team with a huge mailing list or name recognition. Looking into it we found that the cost of a successful crowdfund is reasonable for later funding but not seed stage.
All the cooperative funding options want revenue, and so many are debt-based, and even those funds still look for unicorns.
I’m so grateful to the @NSF grant program, but we were the first cooperative they funded.
It seems like there should be groups of cooperative-aligned angels who don’t feed into the VC pipeline but we’re really struggling to find them. Investor awareness/ education about how to invest in tech cooperatives seems to be a major gap.
Dylan T@chadloder would love some examples I could support
ChuffMeister