Ok, I have read a bunch of public docs by Subvert and I have joined as an artist to gain access to the forum and learn more. All very interesting!
Here is a quick assessment welcoming more insights and opinions:
- Cooperation: their organization is rather complex, with a “cooperative” at the forefront and as their main selling point. I still need to understand how much of this is a legally constituted cooperative with members and how much is “virtual”, extending the cooperative values to an international online community. There is a corporation who contracts staff, owns IP, etc, that is “owned” by the cooperative (again, I still haven’t learned about the legal details), and there is a board formed by different constituencies elected (fully? partially? I need to learn more here too). All in all OK in terms of internal cooperation, interesting experiment, and let’s see how it goes. BUT in terms of external cooperation, so far… they seem to be focused in themselves? Maybe logical since they have been focusing in their launch. To be seen.
- Transparency: a lot of the documentation is public and a lot more is accessible to cooperative members – and joining the cooperative is easy for artists. Good.
- Open source: There is no open source code currently, and no declared plans to open any code. But there has been a discussion about this on their forum, and this position probably captures the current consensus of the members about costs, benefits, and value of having the codebase managed as an open source project. There seems to be openness to revisit the topic. Not open source, but with a reasoning supported by their membership.
- Peer-production: the actual production is done by the corporation, which as of today is a small organization with just a few staff. How horizontal is their internal work, no idea. And as said, there doesn’t seem to be much peer collaboration outside but maybe this is just my lack of information.
- Decentralization: Subvert is designed and implemented as a centralized platform. I don’t think decentralization is something they are aiming for.
- Federation: There has been a bit of conversation about ActivityPub and other interoperability protocols, mostly brought by motivated members more than the staff, and nothing has been planned so far. So nothing yet.
All in all, a very interested and promising project, and the number of members on paper is already bigger than the magnitudes we are used to see in Bandcamp alternatives. There are many question moving forward, and they can only be answered as they move forward.
I wish they would join TSMN, and I will ask them eventually, unless someone does it before. I think it would be beneficial for the network, and for them too, if they want to participate in wider networks beyond their internal community.