Continuing the discussion from Subvert gone live today:
There seems to be 2 basic types of platform co-op founder; co-op geeks who are digital-curious, and software freedom geeks who are co-op curious. SubJam definitely sounds like the former, like Social.coop are and Resonate were. As the @mirlo folks have explained in their own origin story, there is a risk of seeing complicated governance structures working well in established co-ops - often offline ones with different social dynamics - and trying to apply them to digital startups.
I encourage such people to read about ‘open cooperativism’. Not only the benefits, but also the risk of being confused with startups funded by Venture Capitalists. These startups tend to socialwash their self-promotion with language cribbed from activist, co-op and social enterprise movements, so people looking for ethical services often judge them by what they do (eg publish source code, interoperate), rather than what they say.
Even the most genuine cooperatively-owned business comes with a risk of being demutualised (converted into a standard for-profit business) in a hostile takeover. When a platform co-op publish full source code under a free license - whether or not they run it as an Open Source project - members and other stakeholders have some degree of protection against that kind of risk. They can split from a toxic management and set up a new digital service much more easily than if their co-op runs a proprietary platform. The lack of lock-in also makes the co-op less attractive to such a hostile takeover, and creates red flags to watch for (manager types who want to make the service more proprietary).