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 building a social media cooperative for themselves.
On April 24, 2017[1] Enric Duran (working with Schneider, Matthew Cropp and Mayel de Borniol) registered the social.coop domain name, with FairCoop as the named registrant. 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. Platform 6 is now the fiscal sponsor of Social.coop on Open Collective, and the domain name has been transferred to Innovation Cooperative.
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.
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.