Loomio

Could we be two instances / communities?

Dynamic PublicSeen by 241

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?

Matt Noyes

@Dynamic Our next ops team meeting is August 4th, 06:00 PST, 09:00 EST. Please feel free to join the call.

Nathan Schneider

I have been interested in trying to build a new cooperative instance aimed at people with less craving for volunteer participation. I'm glad this discussion is happening.

In particular, I would want to build an instance that is still cooperative but lower-involvement. For instance:

  • Paid management with clear leadership and capacity for most decision-making

  • Defined oversight by members through a board and annual meeting

  • A specific defined mission and affinity

If anyone is interested in this, let's discuss!

Dynamic

@Nathan Schneider

What kind of mission / affinity are you thinking of?

Andrew Shead

@Nathan Schneider Seems like a good idea that should be discussed in a separate thread. I think you mentioned elsewhere recently about using a Credit Union model, which I would prefer.

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Dynamic

Here's a technical question: if social.coop were to spin off more instances, is there a way that members wishing to switch from one social.coop instance to another could have their posts migrated over?

I know that Mastodon intentionally doesn't support migration of posts from one server to another, for a number of practical reasons, although I believe I saw someone's script somewhere that could be used to import an archive of posts, but only to a server that you control.

It's not clear to me, though, whether our situation is different, however, based on the fact that we might end up with multiple servers / instances managed by the same admin team.

Is it possible, (for example) to copy the entire database from one server to another, so that user posts would exist on both servers, and then delete user accounts from the server they no longer want to use?

(If you happen to know who would be most qualified to answer this question, it would be helpful if you could tag them for me.)

Rich Jensen

I hope there is a vote to suspend coming soon.

Louis Allaway

It is well and good to be a cooperatively and be a democratically run instance, but personally and with all due respect I am of the opinion this is a more effective model at a larger scale. What is the point of being a cooperative instance whereby your scale is 50 people (which social.coop is beyond, I would argue irretrievably so) who all believe the same thing and can just give the guy running it a kick up the arse if they do something dumb.

Fundamentally as an instance to deliver the change in social media platforms that we want (that is more democratic control, federation, common ownership etc) we need to garner greater mass. We aren’t going to achieve that by splintering and showing the model as unstable and insular.

I am a member of larger cooperative organisations, we elect people, we apply pressure on people who are mismanaging things, there are paid staff to ensure high and consistent quality of service, there are ballots of members who discuss said ballot on social media platforms etc. Often there is disagreement, such is democracy.

As a coop I feel we should be embracing growth for the opportunity it allows technologically, for the diversity it brings socially and for the social change that we want. Not everyone wants to or has the skill to sit on loomio or matrix and discuss at length the often quite inconsequential, confusing and boring technological aspects of the platform, those that do can continue to discuss management, run for positions in the cooperative and vote in ballots.

I do not see a constructive outcome for a split.