The intention was to provide hosting for web pages relating to university societies, with good facilities for transfer of ownership (since there was annual turnover of the society administrators). Nowadays this role would be filled by Facebook pages, but the SRCF is still there and still useful.
I believe if you want to get the co-op model off the ground you have to start with a particular user community that you're a member of. Then you can start scaling it to other communities. But crucially this process must be lead by thinking of the user community and their needs, not the technology - the technology is secondary and you can always tape together a solution somehow.
(We "nearly" came up with Facebook, called people.ucam.org, but we weren't even the only people in the university looking at the question of "how to stay in touch with your friends after graduating"; it was a common problem of the time)
Another example of a community-driven content hosting site / social network is "Archive of our own": AO3, for fanfic (often NSFW)
The intention was to provide hosting for web pages relating to university societies, with good facilities for transfer of ownership (since there was annual turnover of the society administrators). Nowadays this role would be filled by Facebook pages, but the SRCF is still there and still useful.
I believe if you want to get the co-op model off the ground you have to start with a particular user community that you're a member of. Then you can start scaling it to other communities. But crucially this process must be lead by thinking of the user community and their needs, not the technology - the technology is secondary and you can always tape together a solution somehow.
(We "nearly" came up with Facebook, called people.ucam.org, but we weren't even the only people in the university looking at the question of "how to stay in touch with your friends after graduating"; it was a common problem of the time)
Another example of a community-driven content hosting site / social network is "Archive of our own": AO3, for fanfic (often NSFW)