Hi all, first post ever... only took me *looks at profile* holy crap 7 years... ahem, anyway, I could have made a new account for this, but i figured doing so wouldn't buy me any extra brownie points anyway so I'd just post with this account.
Now that I have your attention, I'm writing this after a sleepless night and basically just summing up a random idea I was working through in my head as I tried to sleep and wanted to get opinions on it. If there is enough interest in it, i might take a stab at. It is very ambitious though, so theres a very high chance that it just goes nowhere. It might also spark inspiration for others, or might just wast the next couple minutes of the readers life. Anyway...
Buckle up as this is going to be a somewhat long read, you could also just look at the following TL;DR as well, but then that would have wasted all of my carefully explained points, and you wouldn't want to do that now would you? *insert puppy eyes here*
TL;DR
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======
About Me
---------------
Not much to say here, I've been lurking on this form since I graduated university, and started to have some income to myself. That means I've been in the industry at least 7 years, and throughout that time I've had jobs in various positions in IT, from QA, to developer positions, to temporary DBA, to manage application deployments. I can confidently say that I have enough knowledge in this domain to build an MVP for this project.
As for my contributions back to this form, I haven't really contributed back as I've only been doing stupid things like walking into downtown chinatown AMP's and playing russian roulette with whoever they gave me. I also only hobby once in a very blue moon, think half a year to a year between visits. I do read the recommendations, but I could never pull the trigger with any of the recommended providers, although I did get close once, but they cancelled on me the hour before the appointment so i lost all of my motivation. Not sure why I'm so intimidated by the thought initiating contact to these beautiful ladies, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it is what it is.
FOSS (Free and Open Source)
-----------------------------------------------
The idea is to basically create a FOSS version of an escort directory (think trist.link or leolist). Doing so means the following:
Self dependant community
-------------------------------------------
Once the FOSS is created and the MVP is released, it should be used to deploy a live version of it for actual use. The intent here is that the operational costs would be offloaded to the providers/community via member fees (mainly on the provider side, as this is in essence a service to help them advertise their services, but it does not preclude clients from contributing as well).
The difference here between trist and leolist is that the fee's would be strictly used to cover the operational costs, and none should be used for things like revenue or salaries. All costs associated with keeping the site running should be evenly split between the paying members (which can be subsidized further by client donations). So the monthly costs per member would basically come down to an equation like so:
(Total Costs - Donations) / # of providers
This is not a business, it is meant to be a tool that helps the community with a very specific task. There may be additional costs required to hire people for certain tasks, but the more you can avoid it, the better this model works. With a bit of creativity and extra work from the community, I think the need might be able to be mitigated in most cases. Some examples:
This does add additional work for some of the more core members though, so if the community dies, then so does the software. Since the code is open source though, it can be adopted by any of the competitors to create a more traditional payment model or just get straight up abandoned, what the internet chooses to do is up to the internet of course.
One of the most important factors that would make this self dependant community thing work is complete transparency of how much funds are gathered, and where they are being used. All members, in fact i'd go so far as to say that anyone interested, should be able to pull up monthly records of all how many funds where collected each month, along with what costs where incurred running the website, and the corresponding item breakdowns. In this way, if anything shady is happening, then it can immediately be pointed out and remedied by the community. This transparency is further made possible by the FOSS nature of the source code as anyone with enough interest should be able to see the code that was executing to generate those reports to ensure that nothing malicious was snuck in on that end either.
Closing Remarks
---------------------------
I feel like something like this has to have been done somewhere already, and would probably be a good case study if this would work, but anyway, this ends my mind exercise. I'm probably going to go chug some coffee now so that I can stay awake for the rest of the day and sleep tonight...
Thank you for all those that read this fully, let me know if this is an interesting idea, or if its stupid, or even if its already done! would be interesting to hear your opinions on it.
p.s. Not sure if this is the right place for this, feel free to move it wherever it makes sense, or even delete it if i'm breaking any rules. This is the ramblings of a sleep deprived developer. Peace out
Now that I have your attention, I'm writing this after a sleepless night and basically just summing up a random idea I was working through in my head as I tried to sleep and wanted to get opinions on it. If there is enough interest in it, i might take a stab at. It is very ambitious though, so theres a very high chance that it just goes nowhere. It might also spark inspiration for others, or might just wast the next couple minutes of the readers life. Anyway...
Buckle up as this is going to be a somewhat long read, you could also just look at the following TL;DR as well, but then that would have wasted all of my carefully explained points, and you wouldn't want to do that now would you? *insert puppy eyes here*
TL;DR
======
- I have some experience in this field, at least enough to write frontend/backend code, manage databases, and provision instances with any major cloud provider and/or kubernetes cluster with some semblance of security
- Create freely distributable source code for something like leolist/trist
- Run the code to self host a community dependant version of it so that fees are distributed between the users, and users are only charges as much as is needed to keep the infrastructure operational
- Community driven admins, can be comprised of well known providers, and reputable clients
- Additional functionality can be created/added via FOSS processes, and PR's to the open source repo
- Interesting ideas for something with this model:
- User driven feature "bounties" that the community can chip in to hire developers to develop a particular feature for them
- "Verification" pools so that people can anonymously pitch in for a well known member on the board to review an provider, so we can stop all the incessant posts about "Has anyone seen X", and they can actually put money where their mouths are instead. (this is meant as a light joke, please don't take this the wrong way, i still love you guys)
- Providers can verify trusted clients
- Link other form handles to users of this software
- If community becomes corrupt, as the software is FOSS, a separate stack can be created at any time, and/or even forked by the community and put on a separate domain.
- Operation costs, money, goals, etc... should all be 100% transparent and freely accessible by any member, and/or even the public
======
About Me
---------------
Not much to say here, I've been lurking on this form since I graduated university, and started to have some income to myself. That means I've been in the industry at least 7 years, and throughout that time I've had jobs in various positions in IT, from QA, to developer positions, to temporary DBA, to manage application deployments. I can confidently say that I have enough knowledge in this domain to build an MVP for this project.
As for my contributions back to this form, I haven't really contributed back as I've only been doing stupid things like walking into downtown chinatown AMP's and playing russian roulette with whoever they gave me. I also only hobby once in a very blue moon, think half a year to a year between visits. I do read the recommendations, but I could never pull the trigger with any of the recommended providers, although I did get close once, but they cancelled on me the hour before the appointment so i lost all of my motivation. Not sure why I'm so intimidated by the thought initiating contact to these beautiful ladies, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it is what it is.
FOSS (Free and Open Source)
-----------------------------------------------
The idea is to basically create a FOSS version of an escort directory (think trist.link or leolist). Doing so means the following:
- The software's source code is freely accessible, think public github projects with MIT licenses
- Any party can take it and use it for anything else they may want
- Anyone can contribute to the project by either bringing up new ideas, or straight up programming those ideas into reality
- Any number of people can "Own" the project, and thus maintain it
- It can also die off if there is no interest in it what so ever, or if a better competitor comes around
Self dependant community
-------------------------------------------
Once the FOSS is created and the MVP is released, it should be used to deploy a live version of it for actual use. The intent here is that the operational costs would be offloaded to the providers/community via member fees (mainly on the provider side, as this is in essence a service to help them advertise their services, but it does not preclude clients from contributing as well).
The difference here between trist and leolist is that the fee's would be strictly used to cover the operational costs, and none should be used for things like revenue or salaries. All costs associated with keeping the site running should be evenly split between the paying members (which can be subsidized further by client donations). So the monthly costs per member would basically come down to an equation like so:
(Total Costs - Donations) / # of providers
This is not a business, it is meant to be a tool that helps the community with a very specific task. There may be additional costs required to hire people for certain tasks, but the more you can avoid it, the better this model works. With a bit of creativity and extra work from the community, I think the need might be able to be mitigated in most cases. Some examples:
- "Verified" labels can be created by a majority rules, or controlled by a group of trusted users
- We can further cut down on fakes/BS/scams by creating things like verification funds whereby clients can pool money to get a trusted user to book with a provider to verify them
- Things like site maintenance, dealing with bugs, security updates, cyber attacks, and other such things can be done partially by open source, but will likely be more consistent with some financial backing. Or if we have enough nerds out there that are willing to pitch in here and there, this can probably alleviate this need greatly
- New feature requests can be worked on by the site maintainers above, or you can even create a "bounty" system, whereby members can pool together funds to hire an outside source to help with expediting the feature
- Payment systems, domain ownership, and full automation in a closed system without human authorization is a hard problem that I'm not sure there is a good solution to though. Essentially we'd have to open a financial account for an anonymous system, and allow it to manage the funds on our behalf... Ensuring that no single entity can arbitrarily remove funds from it or compromise things one-sidedly...
This does add additional work for some of the more core members though, so if the community dies, then so does the software. Since the code is open source though, it can be adopted by any of the competitors to create a more traditional payment model or just get straight up abandoned, what the internet chooses to do is up to the internet of course.
One of the most important factors that would make this self dependant community thing work is complete transparency of how much funds are gathered, and where they are being used. All members, in fact i'd go so far as to say that anyone interested, should be able to pull up monthly records of all how many funds where collected each month, along with what costs where incurred running the website, and the corresponding item breakdowns. In this way, if anything shady is happening, then it can immediately be pointed out and remedied by the community. This transparency is further made possible by the FOSS nature of the source code as anyone with enough interest should be able to see the code that was executing to generate those reports to ensure that nothing malicious was snuck in on that end either.
Closing Remarks
---------------------------
I feel like something like this has to have been done somewhere already, and would probably be a good case study if this would work, but anyway, this ends my mind exercise. I'm probably going to go chug some coffee now so that I can stay awake for the rest of the day and sleep tonight...
Thank you for all those that read this fully, let me know if this is an interesting idea, or if its stupid, or even if its already done! would be interesting to hear your opinions on it.
p.s. Not sure if this is the right place for this, feel free to move it wherever it makes sense, or even delete it if i'm breaking any rules. This is the ramblings of a sleep deprived developer. Peace out
