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.