Thanks very much for answering my questions which has given me a better picture of what you have in mind.
I think there are challenges, as I’ve mentioned related to funding and creating effectively a bespoke solution. One of the benefits of Solid is scalability - someone developing an app can hope that it will interest anyone who is using Solid storage, rather than the coop having to fund all the apps because they are only usable for the coop of whatever size - so a much higher development cost to fund per user. You could share costs between coops, but I think that’s a challenge to scale because it is hard to start each one, and those doing that work will have their own vision and ideas about how it will work, what apps, how they will be built etc. I think all that is made much easier with a common standard that decouples development from a particular group, so I would be looking to combine Solid with the coop model rather than seeing it as an alternative.
This is perhaps where I don’t see coops as simpler than Solid. In theory yes, just build a single bespoke system and set of apps. But hard to fund and do that work, and hard to scale because I don’t see it will be easy to replicate, or rather that it is not likely to be attractive to each new coop. I might be wrong about that.
Moving to other ideas that might be relevant. Have you seen @Glensimister’s post about his Devolution app?
He’s built a demo of this running on SAFE Network also, including a video here.
Devolution is one way of solving some of the problems I’ve highlighted within a coop model so it may be interesting to you, including perhaps helping with the setting up and running an online coop itself. It could run on Solid or SAFE.
The points I’ve made about servers would be addressed by using SAFE Network which also provides democratising business models and gives users permanent data security. And if we put Solid on SAFE we have best of all worlds, so that is my particular thing.