First gathering of collectively and cooperatively run Mastodon instances.

This is really important and needs to be done well. Step one is reaching out to people/instances we know or are involved in beyond our own.

Sounds good, wonder if we could set up a fund that helps anyone who wants to set up a coop Mastodon instance. We could pay for the first year of hosting and maybe pay some of our tech people a bit to help them set it up. Seems like we are financially in a quite a comfortable position; we could give a $100 grant to five new instances each month and still be left with more money than we had at the beginning of this year. And even then, around 50% of our revenue went to reserves IIRC.

I like the idea; this could warrant further discussion (eg. do we care what software they're using? What about what protocol? Eg. do Pleroma or even Diaspora count? What if an existing instance asks for a grant to help them get a lawyer to transition them to a co-op model?) Probably this all could use its own thread though to discuss.

Yep. Agree it probably warrants a new thread, few additional questions to start off with:

• What would be a fair compensation paid to a Social Coop member/s (who?) for the effort required to set up a new instance?

• Are there cooperative hosting providers we could favour?

• Could we make some deal with Loomio to get some referral scheme that would be beneficial for everyone (new instances that want to start a Loomio group + Social Coop that sponsors them to do so + Loomio)?

• How do we promote this offer?

In a way it's a great problem to have that we are piling much more money than we know what to spend it on, but with the whole inflation running wild I do think we should be more generous in spending it.

This might be a good time to mention that I am part of a small group of Aotearoa-based techies intending to set up a hosting cooperative, initially for Mastodon instances, with a possibility of diversifying into other software later on. Depending on timing, one of us would be interested in attending this democratic instance gathering.

I love the idea! But why just Mastodon? Similar to @Sam Whited 's comment, but related to the broader topic. Could/should this gathering include cooperative/etc. groups using any software instance in the fediverse (pleroma, bonfire, epicyon, etc), i.e. federates using ActivityPub or some similar definition? Even software that goes beyond micro-blogging, like pixelfed, peertube?

One thought: Let's invite the folks from Autonomic.zone. They're a tech co-op and are interested in providing managed hosting for new co-op fediverse instances. Happy to connect.

I'd be interested in attending, we have registered mastodon.coop and plan to use it to host an instance for our members and we might also offer Mastodon hosting as a service at some point in the future.

I created a matrix room to facilitate open chat about this idea. Just checked in there and noticed 50 people have joined!

Thinking it could be good to get more folks with democratic fediverse instance experiences to join us there or to connect to us on the fediverse by including #DemocracticFediverse in a post.

Then maybe in a week we run some kind of open scheduling poll to pick a popular date for the first meet?

Hi folks, I'm very interested to learn more about this meeting of cooperatively run Mastodon instances, even if I don't have time to follow a chat room. Is there an update here? I (and members of CAT Lab) would be interested to participate/help in some way if useful, and also help recruit attendees.