Open source or GTFO. :)

Seriously, Lemmy is AGPL. Any client you do and any functionality you build on top of it must be AGPL as well.

Now I am confused, are you able to make changes to the Lemmy codebase? A fork? If you want to find a way to fund development, why not just work with the current team?

As a concept, it could be a valid approach. But you need to put actual numbers to see if things make sense:

• What would be the monthly membership fee?
• What would be a reasonable SLA? If there is an outage on a Friday night, are the members okay if they wait until Monday to get it back someone online?
• What do you think is a good hour rate to pay for an admin?
• What should you pay for someone to stay on call?
• Can I run bots? How many? Does each bot count as a separate account?

I think you’ll see that as soon as you start asking people to put money and to feel like they “own” it, the demands will increase and so will the costs.

For reference, the one coop I am somewhat familiar is from Mastodon: cosocial.ca. Each member pays CA$50/year for an account. I think this is particularly too expensive. There are other cheaper “commercial” alternatives that charge less:

• omg.lol offers mastodon and some other services, for $20/year
• mastodon.green offers accounts at $2/month
• Communick offers Mastodon/Lemmy/Funkwhale/Matrix accounts for $29/year (Disclosure, I’m founder)

Platforms like Reddit and Tumblr need to optimize for growth. We need to have growth, but it is does not be optimized for it.

Yeah, things will work like a little elitist club, but all newcomers need to do is find someone who is willing to vouch for them.

The indieweb already has an answer for this: Web of Trust. Part of everyone social graph should include a list of accounts that they trust and that they do not trust. With this you can easily create some form of ranking system where bots get silenced or ignored.

several million Euros of venture-capital to fund a marketing campaign.

Citation needed. Matrix was funded by Amdocs initially, then got investment from Automattic and has gotten some contracts from European Governments, but AFAIK there is no “VC investment” and there certainly aren’t “millions to fund marketing”.

They do have better marketing than any XMPP developer, though. You basically don’t hear anything from process.one or the Prosody devs.

has many more options for clients,

The problem of XMPP is here. These options are not uniform among the possible different combinations of servers and clients.

The situation has improved a lot, but there was a point in time where saying “this is my XMPP handle” was far from enough to know if you’d be able to communicate with others, and you’d have to figure out things like:

• Does the server support MUC?
• Does the server support E2E? If so, which?
• Are emojis supported on the server, or do they get converted to ASCII?
• Can you use audio calls? If so, which codec?
• If my client supports “share live location”, what do you see on your end?

Not to mention that until recently there was no decent XMPP client for iOS. Even today, the best alternative is siskin, which may have its vocal fans but quite frankly is pretty barebones and has a UI that would be considered ugly even in 2010.

Matrix as a protocol is technically worse than XMPP and Synapse is a resource hog compared to Prosody and Ejabberd? Yes, true. But at least I can tell non-technical people to download Element from the App stores and they will have a consistently-not-great-but-acceptable-and-improving experience.