Loomio
Tue 4 Jul 2023 9:14PM

Discussion: Expanding Social.Coop to Other Fediverse Services

FM Fenn Martyn Public Seen by 193

Objective

I'd like to hold a discussion about the possibility of social.coop operating more than just a Mastodon server and expanding into other Fediverse services.

I'm primarily interested in a Kbin or Lemmy server run by the cooperative, although in general I would appreciate seeing other services as well.

Concerns

While I would very much enjoy seeing more cooperative-run Fediverse instances, there are some concerns that should be considered. Increasing the scope of social.coop will likewise increase the administrative and financial demand on the various Working Groups and the cooperative as a whole. While I, personally, would be happy to increase my contribution to the co-op in hopes to somewhat offset the burden, not everyone may feel the same way, and the services may not be used by everyone here. I must admit a bit of ignorance here on my part in terms of how well the server maintainers are compensated and the breathing room in our current budget.

Conclusion

I think it's worth discussing whether or not we should expand to run services other than just Mastodon, what that would look like, and what it would require. I'd love to hear what people think, especially folks from the Working Groups who would ultimately be the ones running any extra services.

K

Kévin Fri 7 Jul 2023 12:23PM

I'm a part of the small group of Plume (https://joinplu.me/) enthusiasts for federated blogging and I'd love to see a Social.coop Plume instance pop up. The project is now getting more dev time and a bit more activity in their matrix channel (https://matrix.to/#/#plume:disroot.org) + gitea (https://git.joinplu.me/plume/plume).

Plume and Lemmy / Kbin would seem more aligned with social.coop

GF

Geraldo Fernandez (@[email protected] Sat 8 Jul 2023 1:55PM

I'd also be interested in Kbin/Lemmy, and I've heard some interest in having our own Matrix installation, although I don't use that much I can really see the appeal. Similarly to others, to me it seems something that really is limited by the human resources available to us. I don't think I have many skills to offer that would be particularly helpful on the tech or finance side of things, but if we did expand into another service and there were contributions I could make, I'd be interested in trying to do so.

NS

Nathan Schneider Sun 9 Jul 2023 6:40AM

@Geraldo Fernandez (yeraldsocial.coop In that sense, we are in a bit of a bind. We actually have excess budget that we are not spending, and that those of us in the Finance Working Group have been encouraging the co-op to spend. But our Tech Working Group is not paid currently, and we likely couldn't pay enough for standard professional support. So we are kind of dependent on what the TWG is willing to support voluntarily, even though we have more funds than we are currently spending. That is my perception of the situation, anyway.

SR

Sam Rossiter Mon 17 Jul 2023 7:49PM

I've been playing with Kbin a bit recently. I brought kbin.world and set it up to do this

If it became somewhat popular would social. coop consider being the owner/custodian for that domain? I could transfer it over to you. I don't mind managing the redirect service, it should be relatively straightforward.