So there’ll be the ParaMeeter Foundation (or whatever) at the top of the chain.
It will:
- Be a nonprofit
- Develop and publish its charter, commitment to serve marginalised people and never be sold to oligarchs
- Hold all the rights to artwork, source code
- Develop schemes for users to describe themselves that have common meaning on all federated instances
- Operate (multiple, redundant) database servers to deliver these schemes and keep them up to date everywhere
- Have a diverse board that will make sure it’s not doing shady stuff
- Be responsible for selecting (and customising if necessary) the do-no-evil license(s) that are used to publish the source code
- Develop the source code for instances
- Develop the source code for any “official” mobile applications that might exist
- Maintain API documentation for 3rd party application developers to interface to instances
- Develop the branding and other artwork that is licensed to instances
- Develop the contract under which instances will receive their license to operate under the ParaMeeter banner
- Develop the instance setup documentation
- Develop the security policy and audit procedures
- Receive monthly per-instance and per-user fees from instances
- Apply for grants from whoever funds community-interest internet projects
- Try to find sponsors to just hand over cash
- Use that money to pay its devs, lawyers, artists, execs a fair wage for the time they put in (with full transparency and auditing to make sure the CEO isn’t getting a luxury yacht every other week)
- Use that money to contribute to open source projects that it relies on
- Use that money to pay back loans used in the initial setup of the org, if that’s legit (it might not be and that’ll be okay)
Maybe:
- Run some instances? Don’t like this one very much since it smacks of centralisation. It’ll happen at the very beginning when nobody is willing to set up their own instances yet, and we should make sure it’s possible to spin those off to become independent later
- Maybe it could offer use of its tech services or payment processor accounts or something so small instances can get off the ground easier, but still be independent orgs?
- Offer moderation services to smaller instances? Again not great if all the small instances end up with the same 3 mods. Checks, guards and full transparency needed
Absolutely never:
- Have a shiny office. Ideally it will have no office at all, but if for some legal reason it needs one, it’ll be an actual shoe box in the back cupboard of Neil’s place or whatever
- Fund nazis, right wingers, techbros, billionaires etc. (acknowledging that those last two are sometimes hard - gonna have to buy a computer at some point, might have a GPU made by meanies etc., same for hosting)
- Pay its C-suite luxury yacht money