my underdeveloped opinion on cohost (which likely comes from having not read the manifesto) is that I don't fully understand the ideology that is ruling out volunteer work. it seems contradictory to the fact that we post as volunteers. the entire css crimes community was volunteers, and in doing so we got cohost on The Verge. that helped cohost. what is stopping it from accepting our help in a larger capacity?
based on my experience over the last four months running a hackerspace, it's become clear that people want to see a good thing thrive. and that means being flexible, having trust, and asking for help when you need it.
it seems that the major difference though is that my hackerspace is a non-profit, but cohost is a cooperative. perhaps the ideological problem is that a for-profit company should never take labour for free. that's commendable, but the fact of the matter is that the world needs cohost. it seems like a good chunk of our members came from cohost and from that we are incredibly close to being financially sustainable ourselves. YOUR success is OUR success.
if cohost weathers this storm through volunteer labour, then all we ask is you pay it forward. if cohost doesn't survive, then nothing more good can come from it.
EDIT: I don't write this to demand that cohost goes open source or w/e. what I'm trying to say is the entire community understands if the ideology is bent a bit to make this great thing thrive.
As someone who has done community-critical volunteer work before, I think the desire to avoid accepting volunteer labor goes beyond ethics around money (though that is probably a major component). Quite simply, the best volunteers are also the ones who are most likely to burn out, and that burnout can hit so hard that it either leaves them avoiding the very thing they helped build or leads them to harmful, self-serving decisions. Old BBCode forum moderators become simultaneously draconian and capricious, or they just disappear from the forum entirely. Masto admins at best withdraw to secluded corners of the platform and at worst bail from the platform entirely, whether or not they nuke their reputation beforehand. Coders get sick of constantly working to improve a system, only for the rest of the community to reject or at least not appreciate those efforts, until they decide the whole thing is bunk & start denouncing it to their friends. In short, while volunteer labor may produce a better product, it also creates volunteer churn that can lead to random pockets of animosity later down the line. From a "we want people to like using Cohost" perspective, then, volunteer burnout is a losing proposition – you're likely ruining people on Cohost in the hopes of making it a better website. From a "we want to maximize Cohost's lifetime" perspective, Cohost still depends a lot on people saying "yeah Cohost is Good Actually" and is already dealing with random pockets of animosity (with varying degrees of fact-based criticism). Adding volunteer burnouts who can fuel those fires only makes the struggle for survival worse, and you can only hope the value-add of volunteer labor's products can counteract that challenge.
Obviously paying people doesn't ameliorate burnout per se—just ask nonprofit employees—but it does do a few useful things: establish a hierarchy of priorities, provide a clear standard for "is the work worth it" (i.e. "is doing this work worth $X to me"), and define a working relationship with a simple exit plan (You Can Just Quit). I think it's an understandable and respectable choice, then, to avoid accepting volunteer labor & try to pursue other routes towards stability first. As the financial update implies, I don't think staff is 100% ruling out volunteer labor as a possible necessary path to keep Cohost alive, just that they'd rather keep things within their (paid) worker-owned co-op if they can help it.
2 hours later PS: I do wanna also be clear that like, none of the knock-on effects of volunteer labor & burnout like, "irreparably taint" a project or something. I am & will continue to be a Masto user, I have & will hopefully one day again volunteer my time/energy/knowledge in local kink spaces. I just also know that the costs of volunteering are often missed because of missing direct experience, cultural pressures (e.g. Microsoft loves to cultivate FOSS dev because it's basically free labor), or optimistic attitudes around avoiding burnout (it's an inevitability that is managed, not a problem that is solved).
