Happy 2nd Birthday, CoSocial!

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Two years ago today, CoSocial opened its virtual doors. This was after action was taken from the original vision. A lot has happened in the last two years, and we wanted to share some of that with you:

  • We grew from ten members to nearly two hundred members.
  • We upgraded our core Mastodon service multiple times through growth, launched a Lemmy instance (which was later sunset), launched a Castopod instance (at podcasts.cosocial.ca), and are continuing to explore Pixelfed.
  • We have committed ourselves to not only requiring Canadian data residency for our services as we have from the beginning, but we are moving to Canadian-owned service providers.
  • We have expanded our support for related organizations through donations to IFTAS and participation in the Fediverse Governance research.

Our financial situation is solid and we continue to be a small but steady presence in the Canadian social media landscape. We are actively recruiting a system administrator, and are discussing the best ways to responsibly expand access to CoSocial across to Canadians of all means.

As we collectively explore what we can offer Canadians in terms of Canadian-owned cooperative social media, members of CoSocial have been participating in reading groups on the Federated Governance report (reading group summary) and on Governable Spaces (just started) so that we can understand how to better provide governance to CoSocial and assist other Canadian organizations who want to host their own federated social media services.

We can always use your help in building the future of social media in Canada, so join us and make it happen!

Notes from the TechOps Working Group

In the last year, the TechOps working group added two new volunteers @john and @swart, bringing the number of volunteers in the working group to twelve. Our ambitions still exceed our current capacity, but what we have done in the last twelve months is nothing short of amazing.

CoSocial’s main service continues to be our Mastodon instance, requiring constant care and feeding. @mick, @john, and @johannab performed 6 minor upgrades over the course of the year, as well as one major one (to Mastodon version 4.3) which required significant effort and planning to pull of successfully.

Our database continues to grow and is our single largest technical expense. We started the year on a 60 GB PostgreSQL cluster and are just about to run out of space on the 100 GB cluster we’re running today.

By the Numbers

CoSocial’s Mastodon instance:

  • 176 active accounts (+48 this year)
  • Members posted 100,216 times
    • 18,686 new posts
    • 50,522 reposts
    • 31,008 replies
  • Members favourited 141,304 posts
  • Others liked our posts 122,673 times

Looking Ahead: Moving on from Digital Ocean

We’ve been happy with Digital Ocean as our hosting provider since the first one-click install Droplet was spun up by @boris and we opened the doors to members two years ago.

As a Canadian co-op, we’ve always made a point of keeping our data in Canadian data centres, but in light of recent hostile behaviour towards Canada from the United States, we feel that in order to preserve the rights of our members to express themselves on the Fediverse and to support Canadian businesses, the time has come to find a new, Canadian-owned and operated provider to host our services.

This move to a new hosting provider will be a significant effort, but it offers us an opportunity to re-consider and possibly dramatically alter the architecture of our services to improve their manageability and (possibly) even reduce their cost of operation. The work to find a suitable new home for our services has begun, and we’ll have more updates on our progress as it is made in the coming weeks.

If you would like to be involved in this critical effort, please reach out!

Hiring some help

For the past two years, the operation of our servers and services have been a successful volunteer effort. I am proud to say that we have not had any unplanned downtime in the past year, and our volunteers have been able to keep our systems secure and reliable. In order to ensure the stability and long-term viability of our services, we’re looking to pay someone with the skills necessary to help keep the lights on, keep things up to date, and keep our technology moving forward.

As a member-run co-op, we will always be driven by the participation of our members, but the reliability of our services can’t be entirely dependent on volunteer efforts. If you or someone you know is looking for a small amount of side work as a sysadmin, please see our post here and reach out.

More Services, More Growth

When the major work of relocation is behind us, and with some extra hands on deck to help keep things sailing smoothly, I’m looking forward to building additional member-run Fediverse services for our members to take advantage of, as well as streamlining the operations of the co-op to position us for long term growth. The next year is shaping up to be one of tremendous change, and the need for safe and reliable places for Canadians to raise their voice and connect with one another has never been more crucial. I am glad to have had the opportunity to support our operations and growth this year, and I am excited to take on the challenges ahead together with you all.

Wanted: System Administrator

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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:

CoSocial SysAdmin Contract 2025-03-20Download

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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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.