Could we be two instances / communities?

@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.

@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

@Billy Smith

That's interesting perspective!

@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.

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

@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.

@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...

@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?

@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.

@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.

If it wasn't the decision about Meta, then it would have been about something else. :D

Our membership is nearly 4 times Dunbar's number, so we're going to get some friction.

Planning the process for a group of members to create a spin-off co-operative will make the transition simpler, easier, and , will mean that we still remain amicable working colleagues, rather than dissolving into a puddle of arguments. :D

With London Hackspace we had similar situations when we hit the 600+ member-count levels.

We ended up creating subject-domain-specific sub-groups, where people that were interested in specific topics met up regularly, and were able to book the physical space that we shared.

When we moved from the Cremer Street workshop in 2012, we found a venue that was large enough for us to create some dedicated spaces for the sub-groups.

This was how we were able to build a darkroom for the photography group, a certified bio-lab for the bio-hackers, a welding workshop for the metal-workers, a re-furbished arcade machine for the game designers, and, we also had some servers running in the basement that were set-up for different sub-groups to experiment with.

The first few groups that we set up were used as a test-bed for the group creation procedures that are still in use. :D

Interesting question, thanks for raising it. If i may add a perspective from a broader cooperative and history of digital social spaces perspective, forks are complicated but can also be necessary.

A lot comes from a coherent statement of values - we have to agree on what we're doing here. If it comes to a point where we no longer agree on some basic principles and values, then sticking together can do more harm than good. I've seen this happen in housing cooperatives that spent years waging internal battles that significantly degraded the operational capacity and quality of life for the coopers, and a split was the right medicine to let everyone get out of each other's way.

In digital spaces forking has some of the same complications, but also is significantly easier as there are few material goods that can't be duplicated. I am reminded of a few Meatball wiki pages (of which I believe some social coopers were present for/contributed to)

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/RightToFork

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/ForkingOfOnlineCommunities

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/CrossingTheTippingPoint

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/StartAgain

The thing that seems to be the infrastructural source of conflict is that we can't "agree to disagree" on instance-wide matters like defederation. @Flancian has raised the idea of starting a hometown instance a number of times now, and so one idea might be that social.coop remains a single organization, but we have multiple instances with different purposes - maybe social.coop as we know it now mutates into a hometown instance for more personal communication, and we have a more public mastodon instance for people who want to eg. federate with meta, have different moderation norms, etc.That would of course require a pretty large additional labor overhead, and so the initiative would have to come from both of the groups (if there are recognizable groups) feeling like they are being stifled, rather than just shunted onto the working groups as they stand now.

In either case, I think a refreshed focus on our values would be helpful here. What is it that we're doing here? how do these recent conflicts either align or conflict with them, or show where additional clarification and thought is needed?

@jonny

Thanks for your thoughts on this. I'm really interested in the idea of a Hometown instance.

In addition to the idea of having different instances with different explicit purposes, we might also consider social.coop becoming a centralized resource for different spin-off instances/communities to draw on to figure out [unspecified challenging situations], or just a space where we could come together to bounce ideas off of each other. So there might be a number of instances that don't so much have different purposes as just being different core groups of people. I think there are probably a bunch of different alternatives for meta-organization if we ended up with groups within groups.

@Dynamic Reminds me of a concept I've heard @Stacco Troncoso of disco.coop give voice to: the "SuperDisco": a cluster of interdependent DIStributed COops...

@jonny

Chewy references. :D

TY :D

[Apparently post landed in the wrong discussion thread. Posting again here. Loomio on my phone is a lot. Lol.]

@Dynamic Interesting notion. I wonder if "polities" could be split while "infrastructure" remained "commoned".

In practical terms could this mean an experiment in common tech labor/knowledge and revenues? (Perhaps this is the seed of a proposal.. Horrors! 😱)

Persynally I am more motivated to defederate from Meta less because of a negative (threat) and more because of a positive affirmation:

I want to be in community with people who choose something other than the social logic Meta offers.

That's how I got here in the first place.

Feeling that erosion..

@Rich Jensen

Some infrastructure could probably commoned, but I'm not sure how far that could extend, so there's probably an open question about whether it would be a win in terms of resources.

I think two groups with different norms would need different domains and also different servers. Depending on the direction we take, some of us might even be interested in switching to other ActivityPub platforms (e.g. Hometown vs. the main branch of Mastodon). There would also be two sets of moderation policies to keep track of, and I don't know how much more work that would create for the moderators / CWG.

@Dynamic

My capacities are limited but I would be interested to support/contribute to a Hometown instance coming out of this space.

moderators / CWG.

Yes. I've been curious about the inclusion of their voice during these Fed/Defed Limit/Suspend polls, discussions, etc. In general probably good to let the community froth around a bit and then have the labor circle offer implementation advice. A two-step protocol. My reading is this is how this has actually proceeded. Very generous restraint on the part of the Tech/CWGs.

Bravo. 👏

@Rich Jensen

One thing I'm curious about on the idea of a Hometown instance is how our current instance is served. My impression is that there are Mastodon hosting services that allow creation of Mastodon servers without needing to go "under the hood" to install the software on a regular server, but that equivalent services might not exist for Hometown.

Thus, I've wondered quite a bit about what the setup is for our Mastodon instance (and also for the zillion other instances out there).

It looks like switching over to Hometown is pretty straightforward for someone who has already set up their own Mastodon instance (https://n00q.net/articles/guide-mastodon-hometown/). I've also heard from people more technically proficient than myself that Mastodon is quite unwieldy to host.

@Rich Jensen @Dynamic It has been great to see the upsurge in participation in imagining and projecting the future of social.coop in response to the Meta/Threads business. I think some of us could have helped sort out the question of how to organize a discussion on Loomio and how to make a proposal (there was a thread on integrative consent a few years ago). But, speaking for myself, it's a capacity question. That's one reason I am eager to see the Organizing Circle get started, to better support horizontal and participatory processes.

@Matt Noyes

Any idea what the timeline is on the Organizing Circle?

@Dynamic very good observation, thank you! Making Hometown, and indeed any Fediverse providers, easy to host, is within the scope of [[Coop Cloud]]. The TWG would like to offer to the Social.coop community a variety of instances, if there is interest and we can make running a variety of instances only marginally more expensive than running a monolithic one.

I would love to add a bonfire.social.coop and hometown.social.coop so the community can look around, see what fits; then we can discuss where to invest coop resources, etc.

@Flancian

This sounds... amazing. Are there next steps outside the TWG to help move this along?

@Flancian I'm a new member of social.coop, and I've been working on developing plans for a (subjectively) better ActivityPub instance for some time. I've been keeping a close eye on Bonfire, and I really think that it's leaps and bounds ahead of Mastodon in terms of design intent and moderation usability. I believe that Mastodon is built primarily as an "audience engagement" tool, akin to corporate social media, and that to improve community cooperation, the next step is to use a tool like Bonfire which is designed from the ground-up as a "community collaboration" tool.

I feel like the Mastodon software is built at its core to "maximize engagement" and this design goal is necessarily at odds with any kind of productive collaboration. I've been engaged with the Bonfire Matrix chat for quite a few months, and with the help of some friends, have even set up a bonfire instance to test out configs with. From my experience, the granularity of administrative controls, and also the UI design of the backend is monumentally improved over Mastodon.

Mastodon's administrative UI has moderation usability as a secondary concern to "engagement" while Bonfire is built from the ground up to ensure the usability of moderation and administration controls.

Ahoy there! Glad to hear that, Katanova. I'm also in that Matrix chat, and I agree with your assessment of the potential of Bonfite.Â

Note that we've also been discussing Bonfire in the TWG Matrix chat (https://anagora.org/go/twg/chat).

Finally feel free to register to bonfire.social.coop ( http://bonfire.social.coop ) which is up for experimentation (federation disabled for now) :)

Katanova (via Loomio) schrieb am Fr., 1. Sept. 2023, 00:19:



K

Katanova replied to you in: Could we be two instances / communities? ( https://www.loomio.com/d/m4hc80Tn/comment/2973766?utm_campaign=user_mentioned&utm_medium=email )

@Flancian I'm a new member of the community, and I've been working on developing plans for a (subjectively) better ActivityPub instance for some time. I've been keeping a close eye on Bonfire, and I really think that it's leaps and bounds ahead of Mastodon in terms of design intent and moderation usability. I believe that Mastodon is built primarily as an "audience engagement" tool, akin to corporate social media, and that to improve community cooperation, the next step is to use a tool like Bonfire which is designed from the ground-up as a "community collaboration" tool.

I feel like the Mastodon software is built at its core to "maximize engagement" and this design goal is necessarily at odds with any kind of productive collaboration. I've been engaged with the Bonfire Matrix chat for quite a few months, and with the help of some friends, have even set up a bonfire instance to test out configs with. From my experience, the granularity of administrative controls, and also the UI design of the backend is monumentally improved over Mastodon.

Mastodon's administrative UI has moderation usability as a secondary concern to "engagement" while Bonfire is built from the ground up to ensure the usability of moderation and administration controls.

—

Reply to this email directly or view it on Loomio ( https://www.loomio.com/d/m4hc80Tn/comment/2973766?utm_campaign=user_mentioned&utm_medium=email ).

Logo

@Flancian

It looks like bonfire.social.coop is currently invite only. Could I get an invitation?

@Flancian me too? Thanks!

@Rich Jensen

That's how I got here in the first place.

Is "here" the Fediverse or social.coop? If the former, my expectation is that the Fediverse has been and will continue to be many different things, and that many users / instances flirting with corporate social media won't stop that for those who don't. If the latter, it might be interesting to hear more about your selection of social.coop in particular!

@Dynamic short answer: both. Working on a longer more detailed recitation. Fwiw.. first instance joined @mastadon.bida.im (Indymedia descendant based in Italy) Aug 2019.

I agree with the sentiment shared on here. It's a question worthy of discussion, although I believe splitting shouldn't be done.

I am starting to believe that running two accounts, one for a smaller community with shared values (like social.coop) and another for federating with a bigger (and less regulated) part of the fediverse is going to be a better compromise as everyone can decide for themselves. Clients seem to support this well enough. This allows us to retain the values of our tight-knit community without reducing freedom to access more content.

I am not sure that this second account I would use to get access to the content from Meta / Corporate fediverse should be run by social.coop. I see very different goals here and there is no reason for this second instance to be run by the same people (also no particular reason against it, to be fair).

I hear what you are saying, @jicka. On the Meta / corporate instance issue, I think there's a real problem, though, in that the two recent polls on how our membership wants to deal with Meta don't indicate that our membership are broadly in favor of what you suggest.

The points awarded to different proposals in the ranked choice poll on defederation (https://www.loomio.com/p/Kwl1mPCi/shall-we-defederate-from-meta-s-threads-net-) were roughly evenly distributed between total defederation (27%), temporary defederation with the option of federating later (29%), and a "wait and see" approach (26%). [*]

In the poll on what defederation level would be appropriate for Meta's Threads.net, half of our membership (48%) came down in favor of "Limit" rather than "Suspend" (https://www.loomio.com/p/etLGnr0z/poll-threads-net-defederation-level), and it should be noted that "Limit" doesn't actually constitute defederation at all.

If it were up to me, we would proactively defederate from any instance known to be run by Meta, Google, or any other company whose primary revenue source is advertising, but the reality is that we are a democratically run coop and have a responsibility to respond to the preferences of our membership.

[*] Looking at those poll results, I'm realizing that I have almost no idea how Loomio handles ranked choice voting. I thought I understood before, but this "points" business doesn't align with my understanding of ranked choice voting at all, and that's now bothering me quite a bit.

Humans are made to thrive in groups with up to about 60 members. It becomes disproportionately difficult to manage group dynamics with a growing base. To have multiple groups like villages working closely together as a metaphorical „region“, every village with a full set of separated powers is exactly what the federation principle suggests. We can leave it to the villages to govern themselves and focus on getting a meaningful process going within the „region“. At this point it would make sense to have representatives sent to the region level as well. I could choose where to settle, run transparent alt accounts in case I am bored, experience how life feels in different substructures. I would probably have my headquarter in a backwater village without contact to corporate social media and keep a toe in what most likely is to become mainstream. So, yes, sure! Let the established users enjoy their stuff and offer a frontier for those still burning hot ;)

Questions: (Relating to this Region/village concept but applicable to any number of scenarios floating in these spaces.)

What technical adjustments to #socialcoop's current configuration would be required to support development in this way?

Does it make sense to support diverse 'regional' infrastructure through the current revenue/resource pool?

Are the maintainer's capacities in balance with current demands?

Is there a sufficient surplus of capacity to accomodate the infrastructure design paths emerging from the community discourse?

@Rich Jensen Adding onto Tanoujin's ideas, and hoping to answer some of these questions:

I think bonfire adds a lot of capabilities that would support this kind of development.

Bonfire would allow maintaining the wide federation connection, while also allowing individuals to limit distribution of their own posts so that, for example, a technical person would not be faced with faux-helpful advice from non-technical people.

Bonfire permits members of the instance to create multiple "faces" which would enable people to separate their interests by account.

The "Groups" feature of Bonfire would also allow members of the instance to create their own working groups for small projects and collaboration.

I'm new to the instance, so the capacity of maintainers and infrastructure capacity are outside my experience to answer.

However, a single Bonfire instance (once Bonfire passes 1.0 release) would enable all of these capabilities within a single service, which would minimize the additional overhead of maintainers and infrastructure.

LOL. social.coop and antisocial.coop.

Snark aside, I appreciate what @tanoujin has to say. A cluster of villages appeals to me.

@Thomas Beckett

But... which one is which? ; )

Might be a good idea. Clearly, many of us have significantly differing opinions on certain issues and some of those issues have proven to be significant enough to lead to an unhappy impasse.

I love the idea of social.coop playing a kind of second-level cooperative role, a bit like #FemProcomuns, with it's multiple projects and cooperative action groups, or Earthworker Cooperative, or Cecosesola... But, this conversation needs to recognize the specific character of this commons-cooperative space and the resources, especially time/labor, on which it runs. If we can get our new Organizing Circle up and running, and recruit a couple of folks to join the Community Working Group ops team, we will be in a position to organize along the lines people are envisioning. Who's going to bell the cat? as the saying goes.

Hi all, I have been dipping in and out of the threads threads, mostly by reading email notifications, but haven't had the bandwidth to get involved. I also think it's good for me to step back, since I play an active role in SC through the CWG ops team. One of the main concerns in discussion of our Organizing Circle proposal was that it might lead to a more top-down or centralized process. It is important for SC to have discussions emerge and evolve organically, like this. At the same time, an OC can really help us coordinate these discussions. Anyone eager to help get that going?

@Matt Noyes

I'd be happy to have some conversations about next steps for the OC, but I don't want to make promises. Would it make sense for me to try to drop in on the next CWG meeting? When is it? I'd also be happy to chat 1:1 if that's logistically easier.

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

@Matt Noyes Thanks. I'm curious if there is there a reason why the Ops meeting isn't listed on the Social.Coop calendar (https://share.mayfirst.org/apps/calendar/p/KG92DPwX3ww442AD/dayGridMonth/2023-08-01), or is this just an oversight.

Thanks again!

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!

@Nathan Schneider

What kind of mission / affinity are you thinking of?

@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.

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.)

I hope there is a vote to suspend coming soon.

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.