Wanted: System Administrator

CoSocial is looking for a System Administrator to work on maintaining our open social media services. This is a small contract with an initial 3 month term. At the end of that period we will review if the model is working. There is the opportunity to extend and increase the contract.

Please review our posting below or download the PDF:


More about us

CoSocial Community Cooperative (“CoSocial”) is a non-profit cooperative incorporated in B.C., our purpose is to provide social media and online collaboration services to empower our roughly 150 members. We are committed to the co-operative principles, including open membership and democratic governance. Our main service is a Mastodon instance at CoSocial.ca.

Here are the things you’ll do

  • Be available on short notice to do an initial assessment and notify members
    • The Technical Operations working group that maintains our services is volunteer, so can’t drop everything to troubleshoot issues with our services
    • After that assessment, if the issue can not be immediately resolved, help develop and implement a response plan  
  • If no issues arise, complete tasks from the backlog of infrastructure issues
    • We maintain a private project backlog in GitHub
    • Those range from documentation, re-architecting existing services, setting up and configuring services, to providing feedback on process or policies

Our technical stack includes:

  • Open Social services hosted on Canadian servers Digital Ocean and AWS:
    • Mastodon
    • Octopod
    • Pixelfed (planning)
  • Operations:
    • Managed with Cloudron hosted on OVH
    • Coordination via our Discourse, Slack, GitHub, and Signal 

Qualifications and skills

This role is a fit for an individual or small team who are in their early career with a flexible schedule. Mentorship and support in running production services from our volunteers can be provided on how to troubleshoot and learn new systems, upgrade, and document.

You or your team should have some mix of: 

  • 3+ years of experience in system administration, DevOps, or a related technical role
  • Strong knowledge of Linux (experience with distros like Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS preferred)
  • Experience managing full-stack infrastructure, including web servers, databases, and networking on virtual private or bare-metal servers
  • Hands-on experience with DevOps tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and version control (Git)
  • Security-conscious mindset, including knowledge of system hardening, firewalls, access control, and incident response
  • Familiarity with cloud and self-hosted solutions, including managing and maintaining open-source software
  • Ability to work independently, manage your time, and collaborate in a distributed environment
  • Planning and problem-solving skills, with the ability to prioritize work
  • Clear oral and written communication skills, (most communication will be written!)

Location

Remote in the North and South Americas time zones. Preference for Canadian cooperatives, individuals, or organizations.

Compensation

Fixed amount of CA$250 per month, paid by invoice via Open Collective.

Hours and contract term

The expectation is for 3-7 hours of work per month. This is an initial contract for 3 months starting April 7 at the earliest. At the end of that period we will review if the model is working. There is the opportunity to extend and increase the contract.

Process to apply

To be considered, please email us at coop@cosocial.ca  with the following:

  • Mention if you are a member of our cooperative
  • Brief statement (in email body) outlining your interest, this could include:
    • Description of prior experience and skills
    • Your interest in cooperatives
  • Resume or CV (no more than 2 pages as a PDF)

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis after March 31, 2025 and we will follow-up by email.

Elbows Up: Board decision on how we host our services

We have always prioritized data residency in Canada for the open social services we provide. To date we have made no distinction about the ownership of the service providers we rely on. However, the continued threats to Canadian and Indigenous sovereignty by Trump and an escalating trade war cannot be ignored.

At our last Board meeting, on March 6, 2025, we passed a resolution (members only) “direct[ing] the TechOps working group to migrate to alternatives that are Canadian-owned and provide Canadian data residency.”

This decision from the Board is in line with previous conversations about our hosting which started in December 2024. We developed guiding principles in conversation out of our TechOps working group and monthly member assembly, they now live in our handbook (members only).

TechOps will now begin to identify alternatives and migrate in consultation with our members. Please share your thoughts or feedback on the Members Discourse or using the hashtag #CoSocialCa #ElbowsUp.

Why it’s time to move your organization off Meta and X

Big tech platforms and social media no longer fit nonprofits or volunteer organizations. In Part 1 of a 2 part series we will cover the alternatives and reasons to leave Meta and X.

In 2025 we are facing an uncertain future in Canada—our relationship to the United States is severely damaged, tech billionaires have aligned with the second Trump administration, and platforms like Meta have abandoned moderation practices which experts say will make already marginalized users more vulnerable. In light of this, we have choices to make about how we engage online.

I recently gave a brief talk at TechSoup Connect Canada’s “Top Technology Trends for Nonprofits in 2025” about social media alternatives to Meta and X. below I extend on my slides from that presentation.

My pitch in that talk was simple–There is more to gain than lose by leaving Meta and X, even with the challenges of moving to a new service, because:

  • Big tech companies, which have already degraded their platforms, seem poised to make them even worse.
  • The developing landscape of alternatives has matured over the last year.
  • These alternatives likely better align with your values and goals.
  • These alternatives are better for sharing your message and connecting with people who care about your work.

Why do we at CoSocial care? We are a member-owned non-profit cooperative that provides open social media for Canada. Individuals and organizations can join and be co-owners and help set the direction of our services, which as of March 2025 include:

Beyond our purpose as a coop, we care because the stakes are extremely high: our local communities and connections are being harmed by the practices of these big platforms and we need open alternatives that can be democratically governed.

Landscape of open social media

There are a number of alternative open social media services that have been well-covered in the news. There are also introductions on these topics that I will not try to recreate in depth here. However to summarize a few services and protocols at a high-level–

The Fediverse is a network of applications that relies on the ActivityPub protocol and open standard. Mastodon, a service for microblogging short posts, is one of the more popular applications (it shares similarities with X). Pixelfed, a photo-sharing application, is another. Bluesky is a different microblogging service that runs on a different federated protocol called AT Protocol. Both are under development by Bluesky Social PBC which originated as an independent research group in Twitter. In addition, there are other networks, protocols, and dozens of applications in various stages of development.

What these alternatives all share is a move away from social media on closed platforms to open infrastructure based on protocols. However there are many differences across how services are built and sustained:

  • Product: The size of development teams who provide different levels of polish and technical support. For example, Pixelfed is relatively young and so how the application matures is yet to be seen.
  • Funding: Some services and their development are funded by Venture Capital (Bluesky Social PBC has gone through a seed and Series A round) whereas other projects and services are funded by the users of services, donations, or grants (Mastodon has non-profit status). 
  • Ecosystem: Funding differences also impact relationships and key actors in ecosystems. For instance, functions like developing software and providing services anyone can join can be provided in the same organization or across different ones.
  • Moderation: Organization boundaries and product design lead to different approaches to moderating harmful behaviour. There are trade-offs, albeit different from the moderation challenges of big tech, and regardless, if your organization or the community you serve has vulnerable or marginalized people, care is required when selecting your next social media home.

Align with your values and goals

You want to be on services that treat you and the people you connect to with dignity, respect, and openness. All those can help rebuild a sense of trust. Your organization may already choose products or services for their positive impacts in addition to meeting their needs. Or, you may have defined social procurement policies based on social, economic, cultural, or environmental factors. 

While big tech platforms often penalize or de-prioritize posts that share links to content off site, open social media does not, meaning that these services can count among their positive impacts as contributing to a healthier online environment for us all.

Get your message to those who care

There are early signs that you can have comparable (or better!) engagement and fundraising reach on open social media. The value-alignment on media where you own your audience helps you find higher engagement and connect authentically. Early adopters have more prominence because there are fewer organizations in the space. Here are a couple examples of what others have found:

Viral hashtag on Mastodon for political fundraising

In 2024, a donation campaign went viral, with significant funds being collected over a short period of time:

The results have been nothing short of incredible: in the course of two weeks, the initiative has raised over $485,000 for Vice President Kamala Harris’s election campaign. Supporters are coordinating through the #MastodonForHarris hashtag, sharing everything from news stories to new donations as the total number continues to go up.

Table of funds raised by Mastodon For Harris hashtag between July 22 2024 to August 6 2024.
Table of funds raised by #MastodonForHarris. Credit CC-BY-CA: We Distribute.

Traffic back to the Guardian’s website already 2x more than on platforms with more followers

From Dave Early:

Traffic from Bluesky’s @bsky.app to @theguardian.com is already 2x that of Threads. In its first week on the platform & with 300k followers, Bluesky traffic from @theguardian.com posts is already higher than it was from TwX in any week in 2024, where the account had 10.8m followers

Traffic from Bluesky's 
@bsky.app
 to 
@theguardian.com
 is already 2x that of Threads

In its first week on the platform & with 300k followers, Bluesky traffic from 
@theguardian.com
 posts is already higher than it was from TwX in any week in 2024, where the account had 10.8m followers, but

Recognize the challenge and opportunity

We recognize there are still challenges and trade offs to leaving in spite of these benefits. However, open social media presents opportunities to stay up to date with 2025 marketing and social media trends by:

  • Supporting a strategy that puts your website at the heart of your marketing and honours your links to your content elsewhere (Charity Digital Marketing Trends for Charities in 2025
  • Allowing you to diversify, in some cases across multiple formats with one account, and
  • Providing a moment for “social listening” during migration that renews or retains trust

How are other organizations leaving?

Some are just leaving X and using other channels: BCcampus deleted their account and The Guardian archived theirs and stopped promoting tweets in stories. Others are coordinating group exits and using that moment to connect back to their purpose as organizations: 87 French NGOs moved with an open letter along with more than 60 German and Austrian universities and research institutions.

We want more organizations using these services to help build a vibrant future where social media supports civic conversations and human connections over the profits of tech oligarchs. Come join us and be part of something better. 

Next week, we’ll talk about some of the nuts and bolts of how you can make the switch in Part 2 of this series.

Mastodon Server Scheduled Maintenance: 2024-12-21

The Mastodon server will be taken offline for a brief maintenance, starting 2024-12-21 at 12:30 UTC, while we perform some maintenance to increase its resources:

04:30 PST | 05:30 MST | 06:30 CST | 07:30 EST | 08:30 AST

The Mastodon server should be unavailable for roughly 5 minutes while we move to a new server.

When the maintenance has concluded, the performance of the system should be greatly improved.

This topic will be updated when the maintenance has concluded, or with any other relevant details.

Thank-you for your patience while this critical maintenance is underway!

  • 2024-12-21 12:30 UTC – Maintenance has begun, the Mastodon service will be unavailable while the server migration is underway.
  • 2024-12-21 12:45 UTC – Maintenance has concluded successfully. Please alert @mick@cosocial.ca on Mastodon if you experience any issues of concern. Thank-you for your patience!

Mastodon Server Scheduled Maintenance: 2024-12-13 (POSTPONED)

The Mastodon server will be taken offline for up-to one hour, starting tomorrow at 11:00 UTC, while we perform some maintenance to increase its resources:

03:00 PST | 04:00 MST | 05:00 CST | 06:00 EST | 07:00 AST

When the maintenance has concluded, the performance of the system should be greatly improved.

This topic will be updated when the maintenance has concluded, or with any other relevant details.

Thank-you for your patience while this critical maintenance is underway!

NOTE: THIS MAINTENANCE HAS BEEN POSTPONED.

An announcement will be made when it has been re-scheduled.

Stay tuned.

2024 AGM held, introducing our new Board of Directors

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

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

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

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.