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Sell it as a franchise model. Every neighborhood gets its own email server and backup, a webmail frontend, a user portal with billing and a service contract. Yo
by dsr_ 4y ago
Sell it as a franchise model. Every neighborhood gets its own email server and backup, a webmail frontend, a user portal with billing and a service contract. Your franchise owners get Yubikeys or similar to authenticate themselves, and the right to fiddle with authentication for their users alone. They can set their own local prices, and provide as much or as little tech support as they want. Charge a small fee to migrate a user from one neighborhood to another. Offer neighborhood mailing lists. For a small fee, let people moderate their own lists, which don't have to be neighborhood-specific, but do have to be confirmed-opt-in; no bulk upload of subscriber addresses.
- southerntofu 4y agoThat sounds a little like what hosting cooperatives are doing! In France we have the CHATONS.org federation for those, in which a lot of FLOSS NGOs, unions and other local entities take part. On an international scale, it seems like libreho.st is listing a few such providers. These services are not a "franchise" per se, so it's not exactly the same as what you were describing.
- dsr_ 4y agoCooperatives are an excellent model, too. I assumed the original poster was thinking about starting a for-profit business.
- southerntofu 4y agoYes, i personally have more trust in a workers coop with sustainable economics, than a profit-driven company driven by a CEO or a board of directors whose incentives have good chances of being misaligned with ours as users. Webarch.coop and disroot.org could be named as two examples of well-operated hosting coops. The former is a traditional host (shared & managed hosting) operating as a workers coop, while the latter does only shared hosting as far as i know (targeting end-users more specifically).