Twin Terrariums by JunkyardSam
What if the Modal foundation was the institutional steward of Roomy-corp1?
That's the question I tentatively raised with Modal board members , & some weeks ago.
I shared an earlier draft of this document with them and we got on a call to discuss what such a partnership might look like. We've since agreed that Roomy will be part of Modal foundation's incubator, which already houses venerable ventures like Eurosky and mu.
We will enter step-wise into this partnership, starting with a mutually signed Memorandum of Understanding to simply say 'we like and trust each other and are intent on working closely together'.
Everyone building on the atmosphere do so with the understanding that the protocol ensures credible exit for users' identity and data. Carefully designed institutional structures can ensure credible purpose-orientation for commercial ventures.
Roomy-corp would like to become a communally stewarded subsidiary of the Modal foundation. What exact form that might take is far from certain, but we can look to the structural foundations of steward-ownership as the north star of our aspirations.
What is steward-ownership?
Roomy corporate entity
Modal-Roomy Alignments
What is steward-ownership?
The simplest example in the tech world, albeit not representative of the steward-ownership model at its strictest2, is the Mozilla foundation.
As a non-profit organization the Mozilla foundation owns two subsidiary corporations, namely the Mozilla Corporation (Firefox) and MZLA Technologies Corporation (Thunderbird). They are are in effect operating under the stewardship of the overarching Mozilla foundation.
Here's a 6-min explainer on the implications of this arrangement:
This model enables a business to legally exist for a purpose greater than plain profit-making. It can be thought of as a method by which companies are made structurally aligned with the commons they depend on.
What's equally tricky yet convenient about the steward-ownership model is that it merely describes a pattern more so than a formally recognizable structure you can check a box for in the organisations registry of a nation state.
If Modal foundation wants to become a stewarding institution for companies like Roomy, it's free to make it all up as it goes. That is essentially how we're going about this, one token of trust at a time. It's what the Modal foundation is already doing by acting as an 'incubator' for other ventures like Eurosky and mu.
Roomy corporate entity
What we talk about as 'Roomy-corp' isn't yet a singular corporation. We are three co-founders, each with our respective single-person companies, so far deferring to my (Erlend) solo company in Norway for our company registrations with Stripe, Google Play etc.
Here's a detailed accounting of our financials and our aspirational deal between co-workers and investors:
An equitable company
decentralized networking is best realized with decentralized ownership
Current Investments
For five lean years we have been running on $320k from these investors/benefactors:
Erlend Sogge Heggen — $200k (2020-2025)
Peter Wang — $10k (2025)
Jeff Atwood — $100k (2025)
Magne Heggen3 — $20k (2025, 2026)
All on plainly good-faith, social contracts without any legal-contract formalities, for now.
We've deliberately put off registering as a company because we didn't want to prematurely commit to any one nation's legal structures before settling on a stewarding institution.
Alignments
Roomy and Modal are deeply values- and mission-aligned as champions of power-decentralizing technology made to enhance user-agency. Our respective organizations are also very complementary in what we do.
The Roomy team just wants to build product & community. The less we have to deal with taxation, legal entities, trademarks and data policies the better.
Modal wants to be a support system for open-web product builders. It has grand ambitions contingent on cooperative coalitions.
With Roomy, Modal adds a flagship product to its fleet that complements the microblogging archetype of social media with a community-centric design oriented around grassroots organizing.
skip down to "Mobilizing vs Organizing" for the salient part.
The class of social media applications centered around a firehose-feed of information - like Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok - are broadcasters. Such comms tech is great for mobilizing people around a timely call to action. It enables activist influencers to direct mass attention towards some momentary objective.
What the broadcast feed lacks is continuity and a lasting sense of place and purpose. The planetary discourse moves in lockstep with the 24hr news cycle. Anything older than yesterday gets pushed out of view. This makes it impossible to sustain deep, wide ranging conversations over longer timespans, which is a prerequisite for sense-making.
That's the magic of group chat; it's an actual place for people to be invited into and stick around in. A place where relations, trust and shared language gets built. Every organization with a rich subject matter would be wise to cultivate a community of practice where ongoing topics and initiatives persist for weeks, months and even years, letting knowledge and relationships alike compound.
What's more, putting the steward-ownership model into practice makes it much harder for undemocratic corporations to falsely claim democratic functioning. Democracy has a distinctive look-and-feel to it that must not be watered down as marketing jargon.
As for Roomy it benefits greatly from the institutional clout of Modal's Eurosky as the quintessential infrastructure provider for open social applications in Europe. Roomy intends to be a communally developed project like Firefox, but until now we've lacked a genuine proof-of-communal-ownership.
Beyond these general alignments, some specifics:
Roomy doesn't want to be a data host, Eurosky does
Insofar as it can be avoided (which is, not completely), Roomy doesn't want to be in the business of managing servers and hosting personal user data. That is, Roomy is first and foremost a software-company, not a cloud-company.
We wanna make and sell a software-product, not get really good at dealing with GDPR, DMCAs, ToS, Privacy Policies et.al.
We need to manage our own PDS on roomy.chat4 for seamless signups, but that PDS instance can in fact be operated by Eurosky. That way Roomy's unique-user count becomes part of the aggregate Eurosky user count.
Shared technological infrastructure
We're both in the business of maintaining atmospheric infrastructure. We can do an even better job of it together, with shared playbooks and operational convergence.
Shared publishing/marketing infrastructure
We can pool our efforts on boring procedural things like Publishing (native/mobile apps) To App Stores, managing newsletters etc.
Even just the store submissions can be so annoying to do for a lot of ADHD-type brains that it slows down a lot of teams, our own included.
We do have native app builds working on desktop/mobile via Tauri, and the app is published in test mode on Play Store.
Roomy & Mu
These two apps exist on opposite ends of the organizing-mobilizing, small-world big-world spectrum, and as such they are deeply complementary. There's a whole lot we can do to make each app help the other shine.
Financial flywheel
Roomy intends to be profitable, but its prime directive is set by its legally codified purpose5, not profit-seeking for its own sake. Excess profits would be directed back into the Digital Commons, i.e. our open source & atmospheric dependencies.
For an example of how this can be done, see Radically Open Security, which funnels 90% of its profits to NLnet. Our profit redistribution would be somewhat more diversified, opting instead for multiple recipients in the style of the Open Source Pledge6 (mediated by the likes of ecosyste.ms) as well as a similar arrangement for the Modal foundation itself7.
Legal holding entity
Perhaps the first formal entanglement we could pursue: Modal registers the Roomy trademark in Europe on our behalf.
This trademark might be transferred to the Roomy corporation in the event that Roomy becomes a formally incorporated subsidiary of Modal. Having the Modal NGO register it initially could be a legally enforceable way to pre-emptively commit Roomy-corp to its eventual steward-ownership.
Dutch Company
The Netherlands, along with Germany, is at the forefront of establishing legitimate legal frameworks and support systems to accommodate steward-owned companies. It could very well be the the best place for Roomy to incorporate, especially if the bulk of the process could be handled by the Modal Foundation.
Being registered in an EU nation also means Roomy might later benefit from the EU-INC8 initiative. While it's an unprincipled standard on its own (no built-in concept of public-benefit purpose), wrapped in Modal's governance it can turn into a very powerful fast-track to Good Company creation for conscientous technology companies.
Governance as a service
The Modal foundation represents a governance layer that is easily overlooked in the making of open web tech, and yet our technology is only as liberating as the governing structures it is housed within.
While Modal is an eminently European project, its remit is one of global partnership. It is no more restricted to its locality than the Swiss Association that governs the world-wide PLC directory; I don't think anyone is arguing that this arrangement makes the AT protocol EU-owned.
Much like how atproto solves for cold-start problems in networked apps by commodifying the social graph, Modal solves for organizational cold-start problems by commodifying good governance. I hope Roomy is merely the first of many more to avail itself of this incredible affordance.