CoSocial Community Cooperative

2024 AGM held, introducing our new Board of Directors

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On September 17 2024, we held our 2nd Annual General Meeting of the CoSocial Community Co-operative. Members can find our draft minutes on our members discourse. After the member meeting where directors were decided, we had a board meeting to figure out director roles and terms.

This year, board members move into 2 year or 1 year terms. We used a mix of previous board time and preference to determine who of the new board members would take 2 year terms, and who would take 1 year terms.

As well, the board had to elect a President and a Vice-President. Dawn Walker was acclaimed as President, and Mick Szucs acclaimed as Vice-President.

Thank you to everyone that volunteered to serve as board members, and to all members that attended and participated.

Here are your 2024 – 2025 board members:

Becoming our own Fiscal Host on Open Collective

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Just a quick note to let everyone know that all paying members will have received a brief message saying that your membership contribution has been paused.

We’ve used Fission as a Fiscal Host on Open Collective to hold funds for us and pay expenses ahead of setting up the formal co-op and Vancity bank account.

Fission is shutting down Fiscal Hosting, and so the time is now come for us to be what is called an Independent Collective on Open Collective. We hook up our own bank account and Stripe billing, rather than having Fission handle it for us.

You’ll get a message about re-confirming your credit card details so that your annual membership will get charged automatically.

We wrote about renewals at the beginning of the year. You can, of course, choose to not renew and your membership will end on your anniversary.

We’ll update this announcement with more information as the transfer happens. Please feel free to ask questions in the comments here, or if you see some messages that are unexpected.

Annual Renewal of CoSocial Membership with Open Collective

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Wow! What a year it has been. We are coming up on the first year of CoSocial. Auto-renewal for your membership will take place soon, from Open Collective, at the beginning of the month of your CoSo-anniversary.

For some, that will be March 1st.

We believe that, since launch, we’ve offered a reliable, responsive, and safe Fediverse environment for our members at an affordable price, and we believe we can keep this service going for the long haul.

Over the past year, your support has been instrumental in achieving significant milestones.

With your help, we successfully launched our instance, building the community and conversations. In recent months, we have experimented with offering different services Members forum, design challenge to develop our new logo.

In the coming year, we will continue to work on the directions from our AGM: create a thriving community, develop and launch member-ready services and working groups (Castopod working group), collaborate with organizations like IFTAS on trust and safety tools, for example on moderating transphobic content.

We hope you can continue your involvement – if you are new to the Members Forum, look around for a working group to share, build, do. Your expertise and input are essential as we continue to grow and improve our services.

If you have any questions or would like to make changes to your membership, leave a comment in the forum or post on Mastodon with #CoSocialCa.

Thank you for being a part of building CoSocial. Together, we’ve made it to year one, and look forward to many more achievements in the coming year.

Technology and Operations – 2023 in Review

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Technology Update 2023
Hi all,

It’s hard to believe that we’ve not even been at this for a full year, yet.

As we approach the end of 2023 it seems like a good time to take a look at what we’ve done on the Technology and Operations side of the co-op in order to keep the lights on and provide stable technical resources for our members.

It has been an eventful year, and I am proud of what we have accomplished!

I wanted to look back and take an opportunity to share some of the key milestones and challenges we’ve encountered this year.

Starting the Journey:

@boris kickstarted our Mastodon deployment with a one-click install from Digital Ocean back on December 11th, 2022.

Aside from some initial configuration and the setup of some founding accounts, not much happened until we started opening the doors to new members in April of 2023.

Boris and @timbray put out a call for volunteers to help run this thing and a few of us answered.

It’s a tricky thing to figure out how to be useful in a volunteer organization, and I am grateful to Boris for the guidance and encouragement he offered myself and our other TechOps volunteers from the very outset.

Mastering Mastodon:

Our first task was to learn the ins and outs of Mastodon.

The one-click install provided by Digital Ocean was a useful starting point for our little server, but anyone who runs applications on the Internet will tell you that as soon as the system is live, you’re engaged in an endless battle against entropy.

Things break. Things need to be (constantly) updated.

Mastodon is built in Ruby on Rails and is a complex bit of software.

Knowing how to tell what a system needs to keep running smoothly is job one when taking on any new operations task, so we set about figuring things out.

Improving Visibility:

Shortly after I joined the team, we had our first outage.

I’m not sure what caused it, it was resolved with a quick reboot, and we weren’t down for very long, but the incident revealed that we were missing some crucial information about the operation of the server.

One of the first things we set out to do was to cobble together some monitoring and alerting tools so that we’d be able to tell if something was going on that might compromise the availability or performance of the server.

This suite of tools has grown throughout the year, providing insight into Mastodon’s internals, and giving us better ways to understand the health of the overall system.

Working Together:

In April, we were joined by Roberto, whose early involvement has been a major contributor to our ongoing success.

Roberto is a Terraform genius, and kindly integrated our GitHub, Digital Ocean and AWS environments using Terraform. We’ve been building on this work ever since, and I wanted to give him a shoutout for this significant contribution to our operations.

The core tech-ops team has remained small throughout the year, but we’ve been recently joined by Gov and Ian, and we’re continuing to learn how to build on each other’s strengths.

We come from various IT backgrounds, no-one has a ton of Ruby on Rails experience, and unless you’ve run one of these systems before you probably don’t know anything about it.

We’re all learning about what we’re running as we’re running it, which is exciting and challenging.

I’ve greatly enjoyed working with these guys, and I am excited to grow our team and and our technology in the year ahead.

If you know your way around a command prompt at all and you’re interested in helping out you are qualified and welcome!

Please reach out to Boris or myself and we’ll figure out how to get you involved.

Making Space:

Mastodon is hungry for storage!

We opened the doors to co-op members in April, and by April 15th the one-click install Droplet was bursting at the seams.

Every bit of content from everyone followed by everyone on the server gets added to our media cache.

By mid-April we were fighting against the limits of our hardware on a daily basis.

Fortunately, Roberto had been running his own Mastodon instance for a while and knew how to get us set up with AWS S3 storage and their Cloudfront CDN.

On April 15th he completed this major maintenance and we gained the room we need to allow the server to grow (thanks Roberto!)

Moving the Database to a New Data Place:

According to the docs Mastodon can (relatively) easily recover from most types of failure, but:

Mastodon stores all the most important data in the PostgreSQL database. The loss of the PostgreSQL database will result in the complete failure of the server, including all the accounts, their posts and followers.

So this seems like something to avoid!

In order to make sure that this most crucial bit of our Mastodon instance survives – whatever else might happen to the server – we set about moving the database off of the one-click install and into a Managed PostgreSQL instance with Digital Ocean.

Figuring out how to make this work took quite a bit of prep and was complicated by some … less than ideal behaviour from the Digital Ocean managed PostgreSQL service.

In the early morning on August 27th the server was offline for 23 minutes while the data was dumped and restored in its new home.

I am proud to say that this maintenance was the only “major” downtime we’ve had all year!

With this maintenance activity completed our data is replicated in real-time and we are confident that we’ll survive any major server issues with minimal loss of data, and we’re well positioned to scale up the server for years to come.

Caring for Your Mastodon:

Mastodon is in active development, and between April 2023 to the end of the year, there were 13 software releases!

Most of these have been minor bug-fix releases, but they have included one severe security issue (which was deployed with in an hour of its release) and one major upgrade.

As a team we have deployed 10 of these releases to our instance, with Gov and Ian taking the lead in promoting of a couple of them.

The most notable change to Mastodon this year was the release of version 4.2.0, released in October, which introduced full-text search.

This major release required the setup of a new Elasticsearch cluster – along with the monitoring and alerting required of every new service to make sure that everything continues to work as expected.

Conclusion:

Looking back, 2023 has been a year of learning, growth, and building community.

From our initial, small, all-in-one deployment we’ve grown to a server that supports more than 100 active members and can support hundreds more.

Our small band of volunteers have kept things up and running smoothly and I am proud of the work we have accomplished together.

Each challenge we faced was an opportunity to improve, and every milestone a testament to our team’s dedication.

As we gear up for 2024, we’re excited to continue this journey and look forward to building reliable, safe and engaging space for our members.

Strategic Priorities for 2023-24

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We want our Association to be run by members like you, making decisions together! So, we’re figuring out our top priorities for the coming year and we asked for your input. We’ve already had a workshop, two office hours, and an online brainstorming chat.

After our Annual General Meeting (AGM), we opened a poll from October 4 to October 10, 2023. During this time, we asked you to vote for the three priorities that matter most to you.

Now, we’ll keep talking about how the Cooperative and the Board will use your chosen priorities to steer the Association’s work for the next year. Let’s do this together!

Here are the results.

Members can access the poll results and discuss in the members forum.

AGM Tues October 3rd, 2023 4-5pm PST

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Come to our inaugural AGM. We are very excited to hold our very first AGM.

Register to attend here: https://lu.ma/frnzki9y

Save the date for the first AGM, with formal notice and the full AGM package to follow!

​In the meantime, let us know:

  • ​If you have interest in joining the board (we have 3 to 9 seats to fill)
  • ​What you think our goals for the upcoming year should be
  • ​Proposals and issues you think we should be discussing (anything formal that needs to be put in front of the membership needs to be in by Sept 15th)
  • ​Questions you have about how the AGM will happen or how the cooperative is run.

​Preparation and discussion on our Members Discourse: https://members.cosocial.ca/t/agm-prep-getting-ready-for-october-3rd/86

CoSocial Board Decision on Threads

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Two weeks ago, the CoSocial board asked the membership to comment on the question of whether our Mastodon instance should pre-emptively defederate from the soon-to-be-released ActivityPub-enabled Meta community, Threads. The results are available under the hashtag #CoSocialMeta.

Only a few of the responses are in favour of pre-emptively defederating. The primary response is “wait and see”.

Based on this input, the board voted unanimously in favour of the following proposal:

“CoSocial.ca will not pre-emptively defederate from the Threads app fediverse instance by Meta. However, we authorise the Trust and Safety team to take all necessary steps to protect user safety on CoSocial.”

Our reasoning is this: CoSocial is a service that its members pay for. If the board and staff restrict that service in any way, it should be to improve the quality of the service for everyone.

We do block over 200 instances that have been set up intentionally for harassment and abuse, or that are so poorly managed that they are a haven for harassers and abusers. We think blocking those domains makes the experience of the fediverse better for all CoSocial members.

Until the Meta service is released, we won’t know what the impact will be on CoSocial members. Absent a very strong signal from our membership to do so, we should not preemptively block that server.

Individual CoSocial members will be able to block the threads.net domain. This should screen any incoming content from the Meta site for them, and keep anyone on the Meta site from following them.

First Operations Update

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The board and core team leads meet most Tuesday evenings to move the co-op forward. Agenda items and team notes are gathered ahead of time and discussed live. We’re going to start publishing some basic updates around what we’re talking about and working on.

Special Topics

Blocking Meta’s new ActivityPub service

With talk of Meta joining, there are voices proposing to de-federate (a technical process with Mastodon to block connections for an entire server)

At this stage of the co-op, our approach is to solicit feedback from membership on whether we should de-federate, and then the board will vote next Tuesday. A server announcement has been posted, and we are encouraging members to provide feedback to the board by using the #CoSocialMeta tag.

Team Updates

TechOps

Test Lemmy (Reddit clone) instance up at news.cosocial.ca. Early adopter members welcome to experiment, but ⚠️⚠️ currently undocumented and filled with bugs ⚠️⚠️. Follow #NewsCoSocial for updates, as well as the @cosocial@news.cosocial.ca group.

Board previously approved a part-time sysadmin role, our first paid position. This will be a junior role, with only a few hours per month. First draft of a job description, to be posted next week.

Membership

First office hours / open working session hosted by Alka and Dawn. Tuesdays @ 4pm PST / 6pm CST / 7pm EST, watch for more posts and details.

Hosting some regular chat sessions on different topics. On deck: Tim Bray, next Wednesday June 28th, with the latest in hot fediverse topics, aka #HotFedi

Comms

Will be refreshing the info site here in the coming weeks. More content — and writers! — needed. Discussion on sharing basic info about the fediverse, both for new / prospective members, as well as for Canadian media who might be interested due to growing activity in the space such as Meta, Reddit, etc.

Want to help with comms, news, and documentation? Email comms@cosocial.ca

Finances

We have a bank account at VanCity! We’re still taking payments through OpenCollective, which has worked very well for us. Perhaps more important, we have cash on hand – member subscription fees, that’s all we collect – for many months of operations.

To-do: Review of OpenCollective setups, review of projected finances, updates from TechOps on hosting fees, and first paid role.

Trust & Safety

To schedule: a live review / tour of our test Lemmy instance. Moderation tools are very basic, manual block list.

CoSocial.ca: A vision for inclusive social networking in Canada

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Note: This was originally published as a call to action on this site in November 28, 2022. We’re preserving it in our blog however some info may no longer be accurate, please visit the Sign Up or About page for the latest information on our coop and how to join!

The crisis at Twitter has led to explosive growth and interest in Mastodon, a community-run and organized alternative to Twitter. And this sudden growth has presented all of us with a unique opportunity to do social better, by providing Canadians with a safe, reliable home on the network.

We have the opportunity to reimagine social media as a force for justice, equity, and inclusivity in Canada and around the world. We have the opportunity to turn back from a decade of corporatized social media that divided and exhausted us with hate speech, misinformation, and information overload. We have the opportunity to create a new kind of online community in Canada—with your leadership and support.

Equally important, we want to create a stable and reliable place on the Fediverse for people to call home. A place for connection and conversation. A safe place were we can all come together and build a community.

Want to get involved? Sign up

Why Mastodon?

Mastodon is Open Source software (like WordPress) that allows people to access the Fediverse. Groups can create and manage their own servers for Twitter-like discussions, but with better moderation against hate speech, misinformation, and without ads and algorithms controlling what you read. That’s CoSocial.ca.

Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook took the revolutionary promise of connecting people across boundaries…and turned it into something that feeds us a narrow and skewed perspective of the world around us. With Mastodon, you join an online community where you can participate in conversations, connect, and share with others.

What makes Mastodon different?
  • It’s a network of connected servers, called the Fediverse, instead of one site that a single company controls
  • Most Mastodon servers are small volunteer projects, non-profits or co-ops that are owned by their members
  • Each server can set its own rules to protect members and provide a unique experience
  • You can belong to (almost) any Mastodon server and still have conversations or get info from servers all over the network

Mastodon has unique features that make it more inclusive and more robust than any other social network. Instead of relying on a single company or person, Mastodon is a federation of servers that interconnect and share information. You can follow and read posts from anyone on any other Mastodon server, which creates the potential for a much richer social media experience than ever before. And Mastodon is just one part of what’s known as the Fediverse….so a Mastodon server is like a gateway to a galaxy that opens the door to an even larger universe of online conversations and information.

In just a few weeks Mastodon grew from less than 400,000 users to well over 4 million. At its current rate of growth there might be millions more active users by the end of the year.

But this growth could stall if people have frustrating or negative experiences because there’s no safe, reliable home for them on the network.  To harness the Mastodon moment, we need to do social media differently. We need to make an online home for Canadian Mastodon users that’s reliable, democratic and inclusive.

We can do social better

Most Mastodon instances are run by individuals as passion projects. But running a Mastodon server costs real money and real time. As Mastodon continues to grow, we expect big companies to set up their own servers with corporatized, ad-driven social media—just like it’s been in the past.

In order to do things differently, servers need to be managed professionally, and supported financially, by their members. There will always be people who will run their own servers, and this is a core part of what makes Mastodon unique, but to absorb the tide of people coming from Twitter, we can’t rely entirely on people who are donating their time and money to the cause.

We need professionally and ethically managed servers where members support the instance with their own money and time. We can’t go back to free social media services where people and their data are the product.

It’s time for Canada to take the lead again

We’ve never seen greater momentum for an Open Source, decentralized network—one that isn’t owned by any one person or company. We see an opportunity to do social media better. We’ve seen what went wrong with other networks. That’s why we want to create a Canadian Mastodon co-op, owned and run by its members.

Mastodon has strong roots in Canada. The protocol that connects the servers on the Mastodon network, as well as the larger “Fediverse”, was first developed by identi.ca (led by CoSocial’s Evan Prodromou). As the birthplace of the Fediverse, Canada has a wealth of expertise on Mastodon’s core technologies, and the credibility to influence the evolution of the Mastodon community and culture.

Our population and geography are big enough to support a large community of users, but small enough to imagine social networking done right.

Join the CoSocial.ca community

We can only foster a democratic and accountable Fediverse if we as the CoSocial.ca co-op also operate in a way that reflects values of inclusivity, diversity, respect and kindness. As a result, we are a community service cooperative, in other words, a non-profit, with a small but mighty core team of members running our working groups and board.

Learn more about next steps to join!