[NDlurker]

Lately I've been thinking about digital co-ops. Imagine a member owned server farm for running private AI models and cloud services. It could be small, like a neighborhood or citywide project running on cobbled together used hardware like that post the other day where someone got an older server GPU running on his PC. Or it could be a small data center for small businesses and individual users to use. Members could have more privacy than giving all their data to companies like Google and they could have a say in what hardware is used and what type of energy generation is used to power it. There seem to have been more posts over the last couple years about running home media servers and getting away from subscription services; maybe something like that could be an alternative to what we have now.

[supermdguy]

There was a show HN for something similar a couple months ago[0]. Looks like they shut it down. Probably too difficult/low-margin to run as a business, but I think the co-op model you mentioned has potential.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47639779

[NDlurker]

I think a co-op would appeal to the same demographic who are into mesh networks plus all the anti-Flock people. Maybe I'll start something with my friend group and see how it goes from there.