Are you the original author? If so, thanks, I enjoyed the post! It made me think. I've subscribed to the RSS feed but it returns 404 for me FYI.

My main questions is, what does platform cooperative provide that is not already provided by open standards, and do you think that governance should be tied to the protocol, or exist below it at the instance and/or software implementation level?

I think that democratic processes should exist where this is power imbalance, exploitation and no safety release valve that lets the vulnerable people freely step away. E.g., we have democracy to prevent authoritarian rule, and because it's hard to move country. We have workers co-ops and unions to prevent the power imbalance between bosses, customers and workers.

So, a co-op of taxi drivers makes sense to me, because all of those conditions exist: Uber is dominant, they own the two-sided market so it's more difficult for customers or drivers leave, and the drivers are exploited because they have few alternatives.

But, don't open source and open standards provide safety release valves that prevent such exploitation? At every layer of the stack, you can choose to swap out a part, be it client, server, instance, etc. You can choose to engage in the standards process, or you can build your own software that doesn't completely follow the rules if you want, and still take part in the network. Who is being exploited in this environment, when there are ways to jump ship from any of these?

Of course, open standards are vulnerable to capture by big players, since the user count determines your influence over the network. But, is that really a big problem? You still get the tools to build your own pocket of the network with like-minded people, like what we're doing on the fediverse now. You can still convince people to leave through argument, persuasion, freedom of association and making it easier for them to jump ship without losing everything.

On the fediverse, we already have co-ops where each user gets a stake in the rules, moderation, etc. We also have instances that are run as more of a benevolent dictatorship, but where everyone is there freely. We have single-user instances too. To me, this is the best of all worlds, because everyone can choose the governance model that suits them, and we can all co-operate together.

This is where my opinion depends on what you're arguing for. Is your suggestion to tie the governance to the protocol itself, or to push for more co-operatively run instances and software? If the latter, I'm all for it :) but if it's the former, to me that's a step backward, because we're placing a checkpoint on who can join the network that removes the safety release valves and pushes people into a democratic system that they might not agree with.

Open source is about who can see the code. Federation is about who owns the network. Cooperativism is about who holds the keys.

For me, this the essence of the argument. But I'm not quite sure what the keys are to: what power and influence do they unlock? Open source makes sense to me because the people doing the work have a say in what's happening. I'm nervous to give power to users, who are not doing work, over volunteers, who are doing work. But then, when there is funding involved, I think that naturally leads to more users having more influence, because they can always take it away if their priorities are not met. See Snowdrift Co-op for instance. To me, the biggest solution is finding a way to fund open source projects directly from users.