CoSocialism Update
This week we had our CoSocial AGM and it came off just fine. I regularly tell the world that Mastodon is the only good choice for social media going forward, and I think it’s worth a few extra words on why the CoSocial model is interesting, and what it teaches.
What’s CoSocial? · The long story is here, but in brief: CoSocial is a registered Canadian nonprofit co-operative that operates the CoSocial.ca Mastodon instance. It’s limited to Canadian residents and citizens, and membership costs C$50/year. It only has a bit over 200 members but is growing. The service has good availability and performance. Judging by the people who turned up for the AGM, our members seem generally pretty happy.
Why it matters · I think CoSocial represents a plausible model of the future of social media: Decentralized, self-funding, affordable, reliable, self-governed, transparent, and free of advertisers, scammers and trolls.
What we’ve learned · Some of these are obvious, but others only emerge from a couple years of hands-on experience.
Fediverse hosting as a service seems like a potentially good business. We use FediHost, who are competent, affordable, and not US-based.
Being a registered legal entity is good. It forces you to have by-laws, elected leadership, regular meetings, and to construct and submit annual financials. Each of which is work, but none are heavy lifts and their existence has a positive structure on culture and resilience.
The membership fee is astonishingly effective at preventing problems. We’ve now had several hundred person-coop years and have received exactly one actionable complaint against a member; all that was required was an informal dial-it-back warning from the moderation team. The practice of trolling relies on free access; even a little fiction defeats it.
Here’s an intuition without any supporting evidence but I’m pretty sure it’s right: People who pay to use a service use the service more. Our local feed is a pretty rich and entertaining experience.
It’s not obvious how much to charge. Our $50/year is covering or costs, but we’re still relying on quite a bit of volunteer effort. If our membership grows another order of magnitude, I think we’ll definitely have to charge less.
Simple governance is the best. We have working groups and projects, but anything that matters goes to a Board of Directors vote, and we elect directors every year.
That AGM · It was nice to put faces to names. I was a little worried because a few directors were stepping down, but at the meeting, several others put their hands up and offered to serve.
Also cool: We have, by membership vote, an Elbows Up policy, and have successfully migrated most of our infrastructure off US providers. The exception is bookkeeping; QuickBooks and Stripe, sigh.
The only remotely-controversial subject was whether we should change our financial year-end. We decided to do it last year but might be changing our mind. If your organization’s arguments are at this level, you’ve got a happy organization.
If you’re a citizen or resident of Canada… · …consider becoming a CoSocialist.
