I built a media operation that was owned by its community. The community of friars at Niepokalanow owned the printing presses, the radio station, the distribution network. No external shareholder demanded returns. No investor pressured us to maximize engagement. The people who produced the media and the people it served were the same people, and this alignment of interest was the foundation of everything we built.
I am going to make the case that this model – community ownership of communication platforms – is not a historical curiosity but the most practical solution to the fundamental misalignment at the heart of corporate social media.
The Misalignment
The misalignment is simple: the people who use corporate platforms are not the people who own them. The owners are shareholders. The shareholders want returns. Returns require revenue. Revenue comes from advertising. Advertising requires attention. Attention is maximized by engagement. Engagement is maximized by content that provokes, addicts, and divides.
Every step in this chain is individually rational. The aggregate is a system that systematically degrades the quality of public discourse because degradation is profitable.
This is not a failure of the people running these platforms. Many of them are genuinely committed to positive outcomes. It is a failure of the ownership structure. When the owners are not the users, the users’ interests are subordinated to the owners’ interests, regardless of the good intentions of anyone involved.
The Community Alternative
A community-owned platform eliminates the misalignment by making the users and the owners the same people. The platform’s success is measured by user satisfaction, not by shareholder returns. The incentive is to create value for the community, not to extract value from it.
This is not theoretical. Cooperative models exist across many sectors: credit unions, worker-owned businesses, housing cooperatives. The principles are well-established: democratic governance, shared ownership, distribution of surplus to members rather than to external investors.
Applied to communication platforms, these principles produce a fundamentally different kind of system. A platform that is owned by its users will not be designed to maximize engagement at the expense of well-being, because the people harmed by that design are the same people making the design decisions.
The Objections
The objections are predictable, and some of them are strong.
“Community platforms cannot scale.” This may be true, and it may not be a problem. Not every platform needs to serve two billion people. A platform that serves ten thousand people well may be more valuable to those people than a platform that serves two billion people poorly. Scale is not inherently good. It is a metric that matters to shareholders. Community members may prefer quality of experience to quantity of users.
“Community platforms cannot compete with corporate platforms.” In terms of features, polish, and marketing budget, this is true. In terms of trust, alignment of interest, and quality of experience, it need not be. The corporate platform has more resources. The community platform has more legitimacy. These are different advantages, and the second may prove more durable.
“Governance is hard.” Yes. Democratic governance of any institution is harder than autocratic governance. It is also more legitimate, more resilient, and more responsive to the needs of the people it serves. The difficulty is a feature, not a bug.
What I Propose
I propose investment – financial, technical, and institutional – in community-owned communication platforms. Not as experiments or curiosities, but as essential infrastructure for democratic life.
This means: funding for cooperative platform development. Technical support for communities that want to build and maintain their own communication tools. Legal frameworks that support cooperative ownership of digital infrastructure. And public recognition that the ownership structure of communication platforms is not a technical detail. It is the most important political question of the digital age.
The people who communicate through a platform should own it. The people who build a community on a platform should govern it. The surplus generated by a platform should serve the community, not the shareholders.
This is what we built at Niepokalanow. Not because we were idealists. Because it was the only structure that aligned our tools with our mission.
The mission has not changed. Build accordingly.