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Open Source, Cooperative/Non Profit Cloud Services

5 points by rastafarigpu ↗ HN
I have been contemplating the idea of starting a cooperative/non profit cloud services "business" - think of it as AWS/Azure/Digital Ocean with a non profit or cooperative model.

The idea is to start small with simple services like hosting mastadon, wordpress or other stuff like nextcloud to test the waters and then slowly evovle into other services like containers, object storage, etc.

The reason for the venture is mostly philosophical - provide an alternative to big tech and let people, governments and communities be in charge of their data.

Just wanted to reach out to the borader community to see if there's something similar that already exists? Are there similar service providers/communities? Has anyone tried this before? Would be great to learn from people out there. Also, happy to connect and network with willing to join hands.

Thanks!

8 comments

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h2odragon
Will your business be a free entity, or a subsidiary of other non-profits it serves?

If it's independent, you may have "alignment" issues with your clients goals not matching yours (and vice versa); if its a subsidiary that gets even worse. "We don't want to share platform with those people" pops up as soon as they feel some ownership of the platform.

if you try to go all the way to "tax exempt" then you get legal compliance issues too: your clients can threaten the whole business by saying the wrong things.

I tried to do a non profit ISP for advocacy groups that couldn't find hosting elsewhere, there for a while. I was proud of what i did but it burned me out completely.

rastafarigpu
My initial thoughts are that it will be a free entity. As per local regulations in Europe, this can't be a tax exempted enterprise either. So basically a cooperative or a private business with a non profit charter. You make an interesting point - I never thought about advocacy groups and the PR risks they might carry. I was more thinking about end users/consumers and private businesses. I suppose that is a risk you carry irrespective I guess - even if you were a private, for profit business.

Where was your non profit ISP based if I may ask?

h2odragon
USA, and folded 15 years ago. Before then there was lots less scrutiny of "non-profit" than there is now, here.
solardev
I had the same idea, and would love to help with something like this. However, there are significant barriers to capital investment/fundraising, at least in the US. For a small web hosting coop it's not a problem since that's mostly labor, but it'll be hard to scale infrastructure (data centers). You'd just end up being another AWS reseller, I think?

Some existing tech co-ops: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

The only one I'm personally familiar with there was Electric Embers. A nonprofit I was volunteering for used them for years, but they were way overcharging. I moved the nonprofit to Wix instead and they saved a lot of money and time that way. I met someone who used to work for that co-op and they told me it'd basically been taken over by one or two long time partners and the newcomers became second class citizens.

At the end of the day, a lot of these agencies just look like generic web boutiques, selling commoditized labor on someone else's infra. If that's the scale you want, it's probably doable, but with a lot of management and time spent teaching employees. If you're looking to scale it up to an international provider, I don't think it will be easy.

Still, if you want help, I'd love to pitch in. Best of luck!

rastafarigpu
Thanks for the link! I see there are some organisations already in my area - I'll read up and research a bit more. It would be great to say in touch. I'd love to connect and keep in touch - is there a secure and private way to share email or IMs?
an_aparallel
with the advent of bandcamps sale to songtradr, and soundclouds cycles of bailouts/ad support - some kind of peer 2 peer/pay for infra service for bands/musicians/producers would be great. The usual issues of adoption + competing against social media come into play - but musicians need a "good" home for music streaming/exposure.
rastafarigpu
Could you please elaborate?
an_aparallel
say you're an artist...you have songs to sell, and songs you want to stream for exposure. Currently - you're paying bandcamp, and soundcloud to host your music. One thing that really rubs me the wrong way is sondcloud charging musicians to host content....basically they're charging content creators - who if they walk - would have no product.

What if there was some kind of system where the music being streamed was locally hosted, or cloud hosted, or a combination (torrent technology still exists). Some artists dont have that many views - as their music is niche - some kind of polymorphic model which starts hosting locally (somehow preserving security) and can handle 4-5 views a day - and morphs to cloud with some kind of grace period for payment if there is some spike in traffic. Im talking out of my ass here in terms of tech feasibility.

The service provider - you im guessing provides the system/template by which the content is uploaded, as well as the transactional mechanism....a focus on individuality (some kind of canva style templates avalable) artists can custom skin their pages, pay a single low fee to get access to this. As Steam has shown - paying is not a barrier, ease of use and utility is. A huge weakness of bandcamp and soundcloud is their "look" - they both look aweful and dont exude anything related to artistry.

You need a community though - and traction. How do you deal with legal issues - because people WILL be uploading copyright infringing content. Just recently FL Studio (one of the widest used DAWs) has packaged DMUCS-4 or similar right inside the DAW...meaning - it's as easy as already having a sample in your music session which you've chopped - zero friction from idea to vocal/or other infringing material to be added to a song.

This is a pretty scatterbrained post - but im not sure what the nature of your intent is...it sounds wholesome, but i dont understand how infrastructure of this kind can be non-profit and cloud?