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2025 AGM outcomes and looking ahead

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We held our 3rd Annual General Meeting on October 30, 2025. Members approved our financial statements and heard updates from all our working groups.

We also discussed our financial sustainability and updated on our work to migrate to Canadian service providers. We approved a new strategy to replace priorities we set in 2023, made three changes to our official Rules, and welcomed two Directors to the Board. Those Directors join four Directors who will serve out their remaining terms.

Our 2025 – 2026 Board members:

Members can find our draft AGM minutes and report package on our members discourse.

Preparing for 2026

With the meeting behind us, what’s next? We have an aggressive but doable timeline to migrate to Canadian hosts by the end of 2025. The move would reduce our infrastructure costs–our biggest expense–and strengthen our financial footing at our current size.

However, to address our sustainability we need to grow revenues and members in 2026. As right now, 100% of our revenue comes from membership fees and contributions. Thankfully, we have reserves we can draw on if needed for migration or costs related to attracting new members and partnerships.

Our members approved a strategy of growth, service expansion, and improving the member experience. As part of that strategy, we prioritized key activities to do in the near term:

  • Dedicated outreach and communication with key groups and organizations
  • Deploying collaboration tools that align with our stack
  • Growing participation in working groups to adequately support TechOps
  • Hosting social events for members

We already have two virtual social events planned in December: next in a reading group series with social.coop and an end-of-year holiday social.

Let’s cooperate to make 2026 even better at CoSocial!

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:

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.