I'd sure love to pay a tech co-op $25/month to host and sync a knowledge-workers stack including an open-source read-later + Obsidian or equivalent + Zotero + simple blogging with blot or something
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@kissane wow, that's kinda horrific.
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@kissane Oh man, I just signed up for Omnivore literally yesterday
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@chrissygonzalez I am so sorry
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@thisismissem Very far from ideal along any axis except someone's bank account.
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@everyplace Right??
When I was tiny, my mom would take me with her to our rural food co-op for her shifts, and my strongest memory is that she couldn't figure out how to cut up this massive slab of unsweetened baking chocolate, so she finally just hoisted it up and smashed it on the marble counter, and shrapnel just went *everywhere*.
So then she bagged up the shards and moved on and I'm sure everyone around her was horrified but also it worked! And I've been sold on co-ops ever since.
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@kissane please tell me that some of those shards also disappeared into your mouth, because then that’s the best kid memory ever.
Also yes, I remember being in the (afaik) unsupervised childcare area in Pittsburgh as a toddler? Coops for kids are the best.
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@everyplace Oh they did, and that is how baby me discovered the remarkable sensation of accidentally scarfing a hunk of totally unsweetened chocolate
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@kissane besides the blogging step, what are you looking to do with bookmarking / classifying things? We've got both Obsidian and Zotero integrations in mind for #octothorpes (Zotero does RDF!). Also have you seen https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/ for publishing Obsidian vaults? cc @nk
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@jehb @kissane I'm in the same boat. I would love to get involved in a project like this because I feel the industry has tried and failed at "for profit" in its many forms and I think it's time "community run" services deserve a good attempt. I'm excited to even learn the organizing skills involved and how a co-op would come into existence. Count me in.
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@nim @nk I need to be able to sync Zotero and [Obsidian or equivalent] and the read-later app across devices, and I dump the read-later app highlights into Obsidian via plug-in.
That’s the extend of my integrations, really, but it would just so nice not to have a blot subscription, an Obsidian sync one, and a Zotero one, plus constantly fucking through reading apps—but not essential enough for me to wrangle self-hosting.
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@kissane Totally with you. I've tried working with several tech co-ops to this for my lab, but I haven't been able to get the cost quite that low for a Cloudron stack.
That said, MayFirst.coop is cheaper than that. It's not VPS, but does web hosting great. I pay Wallabag and Zotero for hosting directly to support the projects; while not co-ops, they act like co-ops.
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@raf @kissane One thing I love about businesses like omg.lol is that there can be lots of them, and they don’t necessarily have to compete with each other.
Someone could set up a copy called serious.business. Give it a blue-gray color scheme, market it towards professionals.
Then someone else can do the same thing in French, and in German. They’d all take roughly zero customers away from omg.lol.
We don’t need to be stuck with the “big tech monopolists” model! The tools are *right there*!
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If all those businesses work together on a set of FOSS tools, then each one would have less work to do on maintenance and development.
They could focus on customer service, and on building their own specific extensions (which could flow back into the shared code base, natch)
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@kissane What does this look like? A group of people all with control over a server running various apps, and a legal framework to ensure they all have that control so one person stepping away doesn’t close it down? Along with a way to make sure decisions are made an enacted as a group? (1/2)
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This sounds really interesting and a good way to do things. Small group instances of things rather than a bunch of individual instances of things. (I realise you were a bit screaming to the void, so if you don’t want to dig in deep, that’s totally fine
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@mez I think that's the gist of it! You wouldn't even need everyone to have admin rights on the server, I don't think—a coop often has people handling funding, comms, member support, various non-technical administrative things, all of that.
I've never set up a coop, but it's one of my favorite models.
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@ntnsndr I feel like this can't be more than a year or two from reality, as more of us peel off the big products. (MayFirst looks so good.)
And yeah, Zotero is my very favorite thing to pay for.
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@kissane The vibes of this picture, but instead of farming its a co-op constellation reader/citation manager/blog/zettalkasten pipeline.
