An alternative? Probably yes. Federated clone? Certainly not.

I’ll be mostly talking about high proficiency remote work, for local communities seem to either have this problem solved locally, or do not engage in online stuff. Which pretty much narrows it down to IT, consulting, and outright illegal stuff.

I’ve been researching and working on governance and reputation problem for some years now, and I’m quite certain that we need an entirely new approach to this problem.

Linkedin essentially has 3 cornerstones:

1. Social attention capture and marketing
2. Personal and corporate representation
3. Reputation system

All 3 are badly flawed, and not by moderation, but by design.

We would certainly not want to just capture attention there, it’s not helpful for anyone and I do not even think there is an ethical way to monetize this kind of traffic, even if revenue would be used for ethical purposes. Social part? We have fediverse and messengers for that, unless we just integrate all that stuff (which would be quite cool, but somewhat difficult, especially in instant messaging part), adding another comm channel does not sound helpful.

Portfolio and skill display is cool, but lots of anarchic teams have to stay secretive, many devs would not want to be exposed for who they worked with or even with what products. There inevitably be large gaps that could mean anything. Or people exposing teams accidentally. It’s not that there is no way to solve this, it would just take a completely new conceptual design.

But the reputation problem does not really have a clean solution. We are extremely diverse, our moral values and interpretations creep immensely across the community - which made leftist infighting thing of legends and jokes. But it’s universal pitfall, everyone from punks to Von Neumann probes eventually succumbs to infighting - even locally aligned societies could accumulate huge ethical conflicts given enough social links in a chain. And with a diverse society and life we have that would take quite a few links. Using community to define reputation is even worse, you could read “broken teapot” essay to see an example of community-driven ethical moderation attempt degrading into unethical moderation on the fly.

Furthermore, such a project could quickly turn into “sausage party”, as one of my local peer developers calls it - lots of supply and no single actor with demand. Like the many tech coop channels I’ve seen recently. Linkedin formed because there was immense supply and demand of specialists, while we have only supply at the moment. Making a federated project will skew balance further towards competent makers.

In my opinion, we should start solving this problem from the end. Find a way to connect with groups that have a demand. Then start connecting and see what a problem is. Otherwise it would end up a solutuon without a problem.

I struggle with this " find demand" part, as probably everyone else here.

I think the best thing now could be really a kind of bulletin board, where a more informative competences descriptions and tasks descriptions than is common in lying and competitive corporate world could be posted, in a format convenient and familiar for both tech and nontech people. There are plenty of tools that do it, we might just need to add federation and search tools (and accountable local-first moderation, like all fediverse things have) and, damn, invite communities and activists to ask for help already!

If we build this, I’m in. DM.