Community Led Infrastructure

Something I've been thinking a lot about for years is how you build an alternative to the AWS's of the world. I initially thought taking it head on was a good approach, but turns out without the massive capital and moat like infrastructure of an Amazon it's almost impossible to do. Only the incumbents can really compete at that level. I also thought maybe open source was an alternative strategy but it turns out this sort of self hosting mantra only goes so far, it does not lead to real disruption or displacement of user behaviour or technology because the experience is no better for the end user. Crypto, web3, blockchain using decentralised networks was again a thing I looked at but turns out the technology is far too early and filled with scams with a bad reputation, it will take some time for anything to overcome that to be remotely useful. Mastodon and federation has show cased there is the potential for alternative paths but I think it becomes a huge onerous task on each administrator. I actually think it's the wrong approach now, and most value attributes to a few nodes so we don't end up in any of a better place besides maybe some common open source tech to run it, yet the contribution back to the code means it does not progress the same as centralised platforms.

Saying all this, I'm starting to come around to the idea of "community led infrastructure". The idea that we could form a group or co-op, much like a corporation, but one with community aligned incentives to run a common set of shared infrastructure for everyone else. The idea is that you get the benefits of centralisation, a core platform team, etc but one that is not attempted to use you for profit, instead they are directly serving you because of this community structure. This might be considered some sort of non-profit but having seen how OpenAI very quickly switched to being a for profit entity, I believe there needs to be more thought about governance structures to ensure it's always community aligned.

I'm kind of curious to know if anyone has thought about this or is interested in funding this? The idea would be to start by providing a common set of infrastructure building blocks and APIs, hosted, for everyone to use that is a paying participant. It would have some sort of community aligned incentive structure and a governing body of sorts. All the tech would be entirely open source. But the mandate is to fund infrastructure and a group of people who will manage it for everyone.

Thoughts, ideas and feedback welcome