Social.coop
Social.coop emerged out of a desire to develop a way of doing social media that is more just, accountable, and ethical than the dominant corporate platforms.
In September 2016 Nathan Schneider published an op-ed in the Guardian Here's my plan to save Twitter: let's buy it suggesting that Twitter take itself off of the stock market and become a democratic user owned cooperative. On May 22, 2017 it was voted on at the Twitter Annual Meeting, but received 4.9% of the vote. During the organizing process, several participants floated the idea of testing the idea of a social media cooperative themselves.
On April 24, 2018 Enric Duran working with Schneider, Matthew Cropp and Mayel de Borniol registered the social.coop domain on behalf of FairCoop using the registrar Gandi. FairCoop was an attempt to create a global financial system for cooperatives with the help of FairCoin, a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency. FairCoop ceased to exist in 2022, and Platform6 took over as fiscal sponsor for SocialCoop. For several years SocialCoop struggled to renew the DNS registration each year since Duran was no longer active in SocialCoop.
To operate the cooperative, several volunteer working groups formed: the Community Working Group for moderation and on-boarding, the Tech Working Group to maintain the infrastructure, and the Finance Working Group to manage income and expenses.
Like many fediverse communities, Social.coop saw significant growth surrounding Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022.
In March 2024, after sustained effort by multiple members of Social.coop, the registration was successfully transferred to Innovation Cooperative Limited (previously Platform6), which is the fiscal sponsor for the cooperative.
See also:
- Democratizing Social Media by Jakob Sitter Midttun, December 2023, Platform Coopertivism Consortium.
- Issues, Loomio.
- Domain expired Social Coop down, Loomio.
- transfer domain to social.coop control, git.coop.