It’s remarkable that Ampled exists today. Tech platforms are notoriously difficult and costly to build. Still, a small dedicated group worked nights and weekends for years to bring the Ampled platform to life – all without any traditional venture capital investment.
The team has never been financially motivated to create Ampled. We’ve wanted to prove to people that user-owned cooperative platforms can be self-sustaining and be responsive to the needs of people, not capital.
By simply existing, we have made a small dent in the universe. The Ampled journey (as well as the broader platform cooperative movement) has helped expand tech’s collective consciousness to reimagine what platforms can be.
We’re announcing that Ampled will be moving to become open source. This means making the code base public, allowing contributors from all over the world to build with us, and allowing anyone else to fork our code base to build their own Ampled-like platform. The goal: help creators everywhere and contribute to the open web by making Ampled a public good.
By making the Ampled platform open source, we hope to help create dozens of new creator-owned platforms that can get started by using the Ampled code base. This could be patronage platforms that are specific to creator categories (writers, video creators, illustrators, etc) – or platforms specific to a scene/ niche. What would Ampled expect in return? Nothing. We want our code base to serve creators everywhere.
It’s time to stop using Patreon and other platforms that extract value from their creator base to serve their investor owners.
We’ll be exploring partnerships to help subsidize this idea. This could potentially include creating a page on Open Collective or by experimenting with quadratic funding on Gitcoin. We may seek grants to support this initiative as well. Another idea that we have explored with Seed Club is the introduction of a community token to reward contributors for helping steward this vision.
Building without venture capital funding takes a collective effort. We have a community of phenomenal coders and builders who have helped bring Ampled to life, but we will need more help moving towards an open source model.
Are you interested in building this with us? Work with us to help build a more open web together!
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Join the conversation! Come discussWednesday 01/05 in the Ampled Discord at 6pm ET.