First gathering of collectively and cooperatively run Mastodon instances.

Ok, I just did. Asked if they could get back to you.

love this. how do I make sure not to miss it?

me too, add me to the list!

I totally agree. BTW should we add bida, cisti, puntarelle and livellosegreto?

Can you dm @[email protected] on Mastodon?

Following @Caitlin Waddick, @[email protected] I'm definitely "a member (of social.coop) who would crash the party" 🙂.

Great proposal @Matt Noyes , feels like a good moment, as the population of Mastodon lurches. If well organised, could be a big gathering? So methodology/facilitation calls for thought. Plenty of breakouts? Using shared pads (Etherpads?)?? Plural language?

fwiw my first thought: populating the gathering calls for a typology of instances that's maybe more developed than the one @[email protected] deploys?

• incorporated coop

• not-for-profit organisation

• affiliated with a non-profit

• run by political parties - excluded from the list

It would basically be a typology of forms of governance, I guess? Including, for example, commons (not distinct from coops of course, but not identical either ;-)?

But I wonder, whether the intention(s) of the collectively-run instance might also be a dimension. Thus, for example, social.coop has an intention to foster understanding, capability and mutual association in collective/cooperative organising, and other instances have other kinds of intention to promote collective practice and organising? While some instances might be more simply 'social' - serving a present need of members (eg chat, gossip, news; or professional networking, informal publishing; or 'simple sharing' - bunnies/kittens, jokes, recipes, etc), as distinct from 'organising' in a politicised or movement/social-change sense?

Being a little more explicit about this might help an initial gathering to settle down? Without implying any judgement about which intentions might be 'better', 'more interesting' or (god forbid!) 'correct'?

@[email protected] list omits instances reserved for members of political parties. But then, are 'movement' organisations in or out? How is the distinction made? What kinds of membership are to to be embraced? What kinds of openness are to be cultivated? These are all things to discuss of course, not to nail down - and certainly, not at this point.

If the gathering might be social.coop hosted in our BBB/meet.coop space, then I'm also interested in participating as a member of a coop-governed meet.coop instance of another species of free-libre software.

Would love to get your thoughts on how best to organize the gathering (aka big dog party!). As for typology, I think it's tricky because many instances start without a clear legal or institutional type and that's okay. So I think we are looking for democratically owned and/or managed instances of whatever type. I would include anarchic groups and unincorporated collectives...

[email protected] references some of the above typology/inclusion questions ('movement' organisations, etc), when they write:

instances connected to hackerspaces, anarchic groups and other unincorporated collectives. Because it's hard to draw a line to describe such situations, they're not included here.

What are the differences between the instances of 'an anarchic collective' , a 'political' project (like, let's say, social.coop, meet.coop or mayfirst) and 'a party' 🙄 ?

I think this is a great idea and would be happy to amplify the efforts of an initiative that takes deliberate effort to recruit and support communities of color and participants from marginalized communities, in line with best practices across the coop space.