Could we be two instances / communities?
I've been turning this thought over in my head for a couple days, and I'm curious what others think. I don't know that this is something that would ever turn into a proposal, possibly just an idea to contemplate.
Some observations:
1) I'm pretty new to social.coop, but from things various more senior members have said, I have the impression that decision-making and community-building were easier when the community was smaller.
2) It also seems from a couple of recent conversations (e.g., the one about deferation from / moderation of Threads.net if they ever implemented ActivityPub, but the one about putting together an Organizing Circle, and one about how to moderate misinformation) that there is quite a bit of divergence among our members in visions for how the instance should be run.
3) Meanwhile, it seems that there are a shortage of democratically run Fediverse instances out there.
All of this has me wondering whether if we are too big for comfortable discussion of many decisions, might we be large enough to split off into two or more instances?
I do think there would be more value in having a larger ecosystem of democratically run cooperatively owned instances out there, and this could be one strategy to bringing this about. I know we've also had members give presentations on this kind of thing, but I'm wondering if kicking off new instances from the inside might be easier than mentoring new instances on the outside.
Thoughts?
Billy Smith Fri 21 Jul 2023 9:55AM
@Dynamic
@Danyl Strype
Both of those situations can be traced back to lack of planning. :D
"Plan for failure. Plan for success."
I've seen bands split up acrimoniously through not planning what to do when they decided to split up, as there were always arguments about who got the amplifiers, the drum kit, the website/domain-name, and, who got to continue calling themselves that band.
Equally, i've seen band splits that were caused by success, where band members were disagreeing about how the profits should be shared, especially when it came to the song-writing royalties.
The few bands that i saw, that went through those situations amicably, had sorted those scenario's out before they got started. :D
Dynamic Fri 21 Jul 2023 10:29AM
@Billy Smith
That's interesting perspective!
Billy Smith Sat 22 Jul 2023 9:48AM
@Dynamic
It's the result of expensive experience.
One band i was in had not spoken about the business side of things before we were offered a management deal.
We'd just been playing good gigs. :D
Once we spoke about it, was when we found we had a six-piece band with three different, mutually-exclusive, directions that we wanted to go.
Don't get me wrong. :D
Jamming and gigging with that band was great fun, but when the band split up, i realised that i'd been playing with them for a year, and had very little of substance to show for it.
It's why i prefer to sort out things like this in advance, so we all know where we stand.
Harris Wed 12 Jul 2023 7:24PM
I'm very much in favor of there being more democratically governed (and funded!) instances. I think the cooperative model is an excellent one for Mastodon/indie social media servers and I would like for it to spread!
I don't have a strong opinion on if it makes sense for social.coop to split over the federation with Threads issue, but I think one fairly common way coops spread is that an established coop spins off new coops, so generically this idea makes sense to me.
One thing I'm reminded of is this post from @Nathan Schneider suggesting that there should be a larger scale instance that's cooperative, but user participation in governance is lighter: https://social.coop/@ntnsndr/109915290530593935
Dynamic Thu 13 Jul 2023 12:28AM
@Harris
To clarify, I wasn't explicitly trying to make this conversation about Meta (although I know I did bring that idea up over on Mastodon). I don't know whether we'll ever have a real opportunity to federate with the corporate internet, but it's clear that there are some pretty deep divides on that issue.
Personally, I think it's fine for some instances (democratically run or otherwise) to federate with corporate platforms if they want. I just don't personally want to be on one, and I think it would be really sad if the only democratically run instance decided to make that move. If there were a bunch of different democratically run instances, there'd be more space for different groups to explore different directions.
Dynamic Thu 13 Jul 2023 12:32AM
@Harris
On the idea of a larger organizing entity, I'm not clear on how this would or wouldn't align with our existing (?) relationship with May First...
Harris Thu 13 Jul 2023 9:47PM
@Dynamic I'm not sure I understand what you mean about May First. When I'm envisioning a split, I'm envisioning a totally new organization that's separate from social.coop (but probably started with some help from social.coop and maybe sharing some organizers).
That new organization could have a different goal and therefore different structure than social.coop—specifically to be a cooperative that could support thousands of members and didn't necessarily need a high level of member involvement in governance. (Of course that idea is predicated on Nathan's sense that social.coop should be a smaller instance with high member involvement in governance.) That new coop could themselves decide whether it made sense to also be organizational members of May First. Does that clarify things?
Dynamic Fri 14 Jul 2023 10:30AM
@Harris, I should probably mention that I really don't understand what our relationship with May First does for us, just that it is a higher level organization that we are part of.
Matt Noyes Sat 15 Jul 2023 4:46PM
@Dynamic As a member of MayFirst, SC can use their NextCloud instance, Jitsi, and other tools. It is also a way for us to increase integration and intercooperation online. MayFirst does excellent work as a bilingual/multi-cultural organization, which is strategically important for orgs like SC, which are predominantly English-speaking and situated in the Global North. We are also a member of Meet.Coop which is transitioning to a new home at the mostly francophone Quebec co-op WebTV.
Dynamic · Thu 20 Jul 2023 9:21AM
@Danyl Strype
[nod] I've wondered a bit about the degree to which the more common situation is trying to stick things out too long. I'm not confident that that's what makes the difference, but I do wonder.