Recap

Main take aways from today's conversation touched on: upcoming meetings between OC and working groups, better onboarding of new members, federating the fediverse, and anti-racist moderation. Tech WG is continuing to move forward with the alpha server and had some updates on the character limit requested change to Mastodon. Community WG is working through a sticky bit of anti-racist moderation. Finance WG is prep-ing for the meeting with Organizing Circle.

OC and WG meetings: We have a meeting on the calendar between Community WG and the Organizing committee tomorrow, Tech WG tentatively scheduled for late August, and Finance WG is organizing a scheduling poll. To remind folks, this is to make sure that OC understand what the WGs are doing and how OC can better support the WGs.

Onboarding: This topic emerged in two ways, instance registration specifically and member engagement more broadly. From an instance registration prospective we want to make this process more transparent, specifically enable folks to track their registration request as it goes through process better. More broadly this could be part of an overall push to increase member involvement in operations of the coop. @Flancian will take on moving the registration project forward with Tech and we'll continue to talk about member engagement in OC as a backlog item.

Federating the fediverse: An interesting side discussion emerged about better integrating with other fediverse instances. This was brought up as a way to bring stronger asks to the Mastodon developers (see below on character limits). And there is an ongoing recognition that we can trade lessons learned and best practices with other instances. This surfaced prior conversations around how to deal with Meta and other misaligned instances on the server. We'll continue to talk about this in OC as a backlog item.

Anti-racists moderation: There was an report recently on some interactions around race (someone disregarding the lived experience of racism on Mastodon vs other social media sites) that caused a bit of a dog-pile on the server and resulting in a lot of visibility. The first report was very nicely done, being informative and respectful, and the community moderation team feels that we have a good process in place to handle this. There is ongoing discussion in how to continue to handle this and the Community WG is meeting to discuss things further.

Updates

Tech working group (notes https://doc.anagora.org/social-coop-tech-group?edit )

• Proposed date for OC meeting with the OG: August 26 at 18 UTC (possibly 19 UTC TBD)

• Character limits: Still working through alpha.social.coop as a dev platform. However the proposal to Mastodon to make the character limit a environmental variable (allowing instances to set this in a config file rather then maintain a separate fork) was reject with only moderate engagement (see https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30091#issuecomment-2241565907). But this does open the door for the conversation! It brought up how things are decided for Mastodon development (one main dev with a closed team of trusted advisor) being very stable but also very hard to accept community driven change. Could provide additional motivation to federate with other instances to give this a stronger voice. (see discussion above on Federating the Fediverse)

• Single sign on coordination (ETA Q4-2024): Moving to a single sign-on service would streamline registration and other processes, but this would be a big shift for our community. How can we lay the groundworks for this as a possible shift? Tentative roll out Q4 of this year. This will get added to our back-log discussion.

• Registrations issue: We have a known issue with a convoluted registration process for new users. New users can get caught up in the spam filter and we just go radio silent on their application. We need a better way to provide feedback and transparency to users as they sign up. Currently we are using a bespoke piece of software for this and it shouldn't be too much tech trouble to rework. @Flancian will stand up a small working group to explore design and solicit feedback on the new process.

• Loomio to Mastodon cross post: Nathan's Loomio cross posting to Mastodon proposal https://git.coop/social.coop/tech/operations/-/issues/81 This is currently a working prototype and would help connect the Mastodon instance to our operations and governance better. We'll be watching this with enthusiasm.

Community working group

• See conversation about Anti-racists moderation above. This was framed initially as a 'flat footed' response on a controversial topic (Kathe: I applogize if anti-racism doesn't capture spirit of discussion, let me know and I'll edit this comment). Additional suggestion to increase transparency of both the process to respond to reports by social.coop and to consider a specific after instance report; both were floated as suggestions rather then mandates.

Finance working group

• Primarily working on scheduling the OC meeting. Could be interesting to explore how Finance sees their role in social.coop and what work is actually being done here. This could be a lot more aligned with 'legal' then is implied in the name.