Writer, game designer, engineer, bisexual tranthing, FFXIV addict
OC: Anna Verde - Primal/Excalibur, Empyreum W12 P14
Mare: E6M76HDMVU
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would love to make/find a list of websites that don't take venture capital, since it's like the number one indicator of "will this space be remotely usable in another five years"
this is why i Trust itchio and cohost, btw. it has much less to do with the people involved (though i do trust those people) than it does the simple economic incentives of submitting to venture capital vs refusing to do so
totally. the only social media sites i'm aware of are this and pillowfort; would be interested to know of similar things.
(well, i guess you could count some of the conservative ones re: venture capital, but my understanding is more that they want it and can't get it 🙈)
What about Dreamwidth and Mastodon? (I use neither; my impression as an outsider is they're not VC backed.)
also neocities which is more robust under the hood than it looks (it has a page update feed, for example) though it's definitely still a different kind of thing
forgot about dreamwidth! there’s mastodon, yeah. i’d been thinking of it in a different category due to it being a fediverse thing. but you’re right that it also doesn’t have that.
Just realized the most famous Mastodon instance is Truth Social, and they did take VC.
I still worry about these places being sold off and gutted eventually but I guess there's nothing we can really DO about that at this point.
yeah. it's less that not accepting VC is a guarantee of sustainability/goodness, and more that it means that it's not guaranteed to not be sustainable either
which, y'know, any hope is better than none, and hoping at all with this kinda thing still feels weird sometimes
ZA/UM is a pretty instructive example of how even the best people can and will get fucked and their work twisted just by letting money-havers get their hooks in.
it's very much not a venture capital situation. VC's tend to be firms, by all accounts cohost's investor is a person (though anonymous), and VC's invest in exchange for equity, and all equity of cohost is owned by the workers, right now colin, jae, and aidan, though there's mechanisms to continue to welcome new full-time workers as co-owners after their first year of employment. cohost as an entity simply owes the investor back the money as a loan at the moment. which means, currently, becoming a co-owner of cohost involves taking on partial responsibility for that debt. kind of a mixed blessing lol
I did a list of the ownership models/business structures of various Twitter alternatives people are talking about atm https://cohost.org/dzuk/post/334904-investigating-the-co
I also did some big/important examples of VC/public/private/worker coop businesses making online services and products in my guide about this sort of phenomenon (https://cohost.org/dzuk/post/130948-will-the-company-ma)
