News

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.

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.

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