Giveth.io (for the people) or endaoment.org (for the institutions)

Hi Franzi - FYI, Colorado law requires that compensation be disclosed in all job postings when hiring in the state.

“Specifically, it requires employers to disclose compensation in all job postings and notices, both internal and public.”

@mikerabin.bsky.social

16/ Every time you choose a cooperative digital platform, you're voting for a social media ecosystem where power and control are distributed more equitably.

Not a bad outcome for simply choosing where to share your cat photos, right?

15/ It's not about destroying social media or forcing everyone onto obscure platforms with clunky interfaces. I'm a design engineer, not a digital anarchist.

It's about rebalancing who benefits from our digital commons and who has a voice in how it functions.

14/ Where algorithms were designed for community wellbeing rather than engagement, where privacy was a fundamental design principle rather than an afterthought.

Where the economic value generated was shared among those who created it.

13/ Imagine a platform where terms of service were written and voted on by users, where content moderation decisions were made through representative governance.

12/ And yet, the cooperative internet movement grows. Decentralized platforms, user-owned data structures, blockchain-based governance, and community-operated servers are expanding.

11/ The "Big Tech" landscape is dominated by a handful of corporations with trillion-dollar valuations and unprecedented power over our public discourse.

Meanwhile, cooperative alternatives remain tiny, with user bases measured in thousands or millions rather than billions.

10/ The biggest hurdle isn't technology - it's the network effect. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok won because everyone's friends were already there.

Cracks are appearing. Users are frustrated with surveillance capitalism, arbitrary content moderation, and eroding trust in tech giants.

9/ The digital landscape is ripe for co-op alternatives: content moderation that respects community standards, data ownership that centers privacy.

Also needed: algorithm design for user wellbeing instead of engagement, and financing models that don't require exponential growth.

8/ In a co-op platform? Value could flow back to the community, finance better content moderation, fund quality journalism, or provide dividends to users who contribute most.

7/ In typical platforms, your attention gets monetized, your data gets sold, and profits flow to venture capitalists who view users as commodities.

6/ Mastodon? A decentralized network of servers, no central authority. Diaspora? User-owned data you can take across the internet. Platform co-ops? Users owning shares in the platforms they use.

5/ What if social media platforms were actually owned and governed by their users? What if the people posting, liking, sharing, and scrolling had a say in how the technology operated?

4/ When a company is privately owned, the algorithms, data policies, and content moderation decisions get made behind closed doors by people who never have to face their users.

3/ Different layers receive venture capital from financial institutions - almost all use shareholder owned banks or private equity. Almost none use credit unions or CDFIs.

Each company has a product, service, or mission... And in most cases, that product is actually YOU.

2/ At each phase of this "digital chain" there is a company. Almost none are equitable co-ops, most are profit-maximizing surveillance corporations, margins are astronomical.