Re: [Social-discuss] Hosting Freedom and Hardware Sharing

[Jason Self]

Patrick Anderson <address@hidden> wrote ..
> Henry Litwhiler wrote:
> > what we would be doing, in effect, would be creating what is already there.
> 
> Well, the difference I am proposing is that the Users and the Owners
> are the *exact* same set.
> 
> 
> > The only difference would be the people running it
> 
> By "running it" do you mean the Workers or the Owners?
> 
> 
> > so it would still come down to users having to
> > trust the server operators enough to surrender over their data.
> 
> But what if groups of collective users were the actual Owners of those 
servers?
> 
> They could hire skilled Workers if they like, but would not relinquish
> control except for the amount the must give-up to be able to share
> between themselves.
> 
> The difference between this idea and the self-hosting idea is the
> ability to pool resources.
> 
> After we discover how to do this, we can also tackle bigger problems
> all along the chain, such as becoming truly Free as in Freedom ISP and
> cell-phone services and even the most important production of all =
> agriculture.
> 
> 
> > We need to give users the tools to perform social networking functions -
> > not just supply them with another service.
> 
> I'm talking about the Users supplying *themselves* with the service
> (with respect to Ownership).  They could also choose to be the Workers
> as well, but more often would hire skilled workers to accomplish what
> they do not know how to do.
> 
> Those hired Workers could not wrest control from the Users, since any
> attempt to do so would cause them to be fired.

While there may be value in what you're describing, I believe it's beyond the 
scope of the decentralized social networking software called GNU Social.