Hello, CoSocial community! This is an update from the board and team leads of CoSocial, a Canadian member-owned cooperative.
We continue to welcome new members to the cooperative. We’re currently at 62 members, and want to close in on 100 ASAP. If you’ve been thinking about joining, or you are already a member and want to invite friends, family, or colleagues, now is the time.
Our volunteer teams are handling our current scale, but we want to be ready for continued growth, so we’re looking for new people to onboard. If you are interested in joining a team, please send an email to the appropriate team lead:
If you’re already a CoSocial member, make sure to follow the @coop@cosocial.ca account to get news and updates about the coop.
The #CoSocialHour hashtag is a discussion hashtag for the CoSocial community.
Our first general meeting is coming up this fall! Members will vote for our next board and discuss important issues related to the cooperative. Keep an eye out for more news on this.
Hello, world! It’s been a while since we told you what’s going on with CoSocial. Here are some important milestones!
We’ve incorporated! We’ve edited and reviewed our articles of incorporation, assembled an initial board of directors, and registered a new cooperative on March 1st. The COSOCIAL COMMUNITY COOPERATIVE is now a real thing!
We’ve added our first members. We have about 10 new members to the cooperative, as seen on our OpenCollective page.
We set up a new Mastodon instance. Our instance at cosocial.ca is up and running and connected to the rest of the fediverse.
Our volunteer teams are practicing maintaining a real instance. Our trust and safety team is actively moderating the instance. It’s a team of four, with more volunteers coming on in the next few days. Our tech ops volunteer team has handled a few server incidents, some planned downtime, and a server upgrade.
We are actively using cosocial.ca as our main accounts. Some of our early members have already moved their other Mastodon accounts with thousands of followers to the new server. It’s running well and keeping up with the load of daily posts.
So what’s next? We think we’re ready to start letting more people on. For this reason, we’re reaching out to people who’ve expressed interest in CoSocial.
To get your Mastodon account:
Sign up for a new Mastodon account at https://cosocial.ca/auth/sign_up . Make sure to note if you’re willing to volunteer for trust-and-safety, tech, comms, or other operations work. Our current limits are due to making sure we’ve got enough volunteers to keep the community and technology running smoothly, so the more volunteers we get, the more people we can let in! And bear in mind that CoSocial is designed for sustainability, so the plan is for ops and moderation to be paid work.
After being contacted by CoSocial trust-and-safety, sign up for OpenCollective. It’s a CAD$50/year annual membership. While many Mastodon instances are free, we are committed to a safe and moderated experience. So there is a fee that our non-profit will recoup the costs for moderation, servers, and all the expenses. Our research tells us that that price should be sufficient to build a co-op that’s sustainable for the long term.
Once we’ve been notified of the sign up, your account will be approved and you’re ready to get started! Come on board and post and #introduction!
We’re really excited to get started bringing new CoSocial members on board. We hope you’re as ready as we are to see cooperatively-run social media become a reality in Canada. It’s a big step and we’re glad to be taking it with you.
