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

Scheduled Downtime for Database Upgrade

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We are announcing a scheduled downtime of 30minutes to 1 hour for a database upgrade on the main CoSocial Mastodon server. This will take place Sunday, Aug 27th, in the morning.

Time ZoneStartEnd
UTC11:3012:30
ADT09:3010:30
EDT07:3008:30
CDT06:3007:30
MDT05:3006:30
PDT04:3005:30

The Mastodon server cosocial.ca will not be available for posting or reading during this time.

Please bookmark this status page for updates during that time.

More about the database upgrade

Currently the Mastodon server and database are on the same virtual server in the Digital Ocean Toronto data center. We are moving the database to the Digital Ocean Managed Database service. The service takes care of backups and includes a standby database that is kept in sync.

The most important information in Mastodon is kept in the database, and this move will help with both scalability and backups.

Mastodon update and brief downtime

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The TechOps team will be performing an upgrade to the 4.1.5 version of Mastodon, as well as some database maintenance and upgrades. This is aimed to take place between 10:30am PST / 1:30pm EST and 1:30pm PST / 4:30pm EST, Friday, July 21st, 2023. There will be some brief downtime of 5 minutes or so in duration as a full restart of all systems will be required.

Tag the @coop@cosocial.ca account if you notice any issues.

CoSocial Board Decision on Threads

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Two weeks ago, the CoSocial board asked the membership to comment on the question of whether our Mastodon instance should pre-emptively defederate from the soon-to-be-released ActivityPub-enabled Meta community, Threads. The results are available under the hashtag #CoSocialMeta.

Only a few of the responses are in favour of pre-emptively defederating. The primary response is “wait and see”.

Based on this input, the board voted unanimously in favour of the following proposal:

“CoSocial.ca will not pre-emptively defederate from the Threads app fediverse instance by Meta. However, we authorise the Trust and Safety team to take all necessary steps to protect user safety on CoSocial.”

Our reasoning is this: CoSocial is a service that its members pay for. If the board and staff restrict that service in any way, it should be to improve the quality of the service for everyone.

We do block over 200 instances that have been set up intentionally for harassment and abuse, or that are so poorly managed that they are a haven for harassers and abusers. We think blocking those domains makes the experience of the fediverse better for all CoSocial members.

Until the Meta service is released, we won’t know what the impact will be on CoSocial members. Absent a very strong signal from our membership to do so, we should not preemptively block that server.

Individual CoSocial members will be able to block the threads.net domain. This should screen any incoming content from the Meta site for them, and keep anyone on the Meta site from following them.

First Operations Update

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The board and core team leads meet most Tuesday evenings to move the co-op forward. Agenda items and team notes are gathered ahead of time and discussed live. We’re going to start publishing some basic updates around what we’re talking about and working on.

Special Topics

Blocking Meta’s new ActivityPub service

With talk of Meta joining, there are voices proposing to de-federate (a technical process with Mastodon to block connections for an entire server)

At this stage of the co-op, our approach is to solicit feedback from membership on whether we should de-federate, and then the board will vote next Tuesday. A server announcement has been posted, and we are encouraging members to provide feedback to the board by using the #CoSocialMeta tag.

Team Updates

TechOps

Test Lemmy (Reddit clone) instance up at news.cosocial.ca. Early adopter members welcome to experiment, but ⚠️⚠️ currently undocumented and filled with bugs ⚠️⚠️. Follow #NewsCoSocial for updates, as well as the @cosocial@news.cosocial.ca group.

Board previously approved a part-time sysadmin role, our first paid position. This will be a junior role, with only a few hours per month. First draft of a job description, to be posted next week.

Membership

First office hours / open working session hosted by Alka and Dawn. Tuesdays @ 4pm PST / 6pm CST / 7pm EST, watch for more posts and details.

Hosting some regular chat sessions on different topics. On deck: Tim Bray, next Wednesday June 28th, with the latest in hot fediverse topics, aka #HotFedi

Comms

Will be refreshing the info site here in the coming weeks. More content — and writers! — needed. Discussion on sharing basic info about the fediverse, both for new / prospective members, as well as for Canadian media who might be interested due to growing activity in the space such as Meta, Reddit, etc.

Want to help with comms, news, and documentation? Email comms@cosocial.ca

Finances

We have a bank account at VanCity! We’re still taking payments through OpenCollective, which has worked very well for us. Perhaps more important, we have cash on hand – member subscription fees, that’s all we collect – for many months of operations.

To-do: Review of OpenCollective setups, review of projected finances, updates from TechOps on hosting fees, and first paid role.

Trust & Safety

To schedule: a live review / tour of our test Lemmy instance. Moderation tools are very basic, manual block list.

CoSocial Update June 2023

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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.

If you’re new to CoSocial, read more about us »

Scheduled Downtime 2023-04-11

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We have had a number of new users this week and that has caused a large increase in storage. We are moving to a scalable file backend, but for now we are going to increase the size of the server disk.

This will take up to 90 minutes of downtime, so we plan to perform it this evening, Tuesday, April 11th, at around 7pm PST / 10pm EST.

Large account migration, potential for service impact

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We’re welcoming Tim Bray to the CoSocial Mastodon server today. He’s written a blog post talking about the move and what we’re doing here. Tim has quite a large following, so we expect some server load as part of him moving his account.

Things might be slow or unresponsive starting at 5PM PST, and we may even have a server outage. You can follow this post to find out current status.

This is the first TechOps status post. We’ll use this blog and messages like this to give updates about technical infrastructure, especially in case of downtime.