Welcome to Social.coop
Social.coop is cooperatively-run, long-running, stable provider of social media. We primarily provide a member-moderated Mastodon server for microblogging on the Fediverse, but we a have a variety of additional services for members and tools for coordinating within the coop.
We are also a community. Our values include: honesty, openness, social responsibility, and caring for others. We celebrate diversity and do not tolerate bigotry or prejudice. Members contribute funds and volunteer labor to set our community policies, steward our data, and manage our shared technologies. As well as maintaining the current services, members can be part of experiments with new social media platforms and tools such as Bonfire.
While many of our members are co-ops or associated with co-ops, anyone who is interested in being part of this cooperatively run community and willing to adhere to our Code of Conduct is welcome to join: join.social.coop.
Social.coop was founded in 2017 in the wake of the BuyTwitter campaign. Since then, we have worked toward the goal of placing ever more of our online social lives under good cooperative governance. To get a sense of how we operate, or to start your own fediverse cooperative, see our guide on "How to Make the Fediverse Your Own."
New to the Fediverse? Check out the Social.coop guide to Mastodon.
Learn more
- Governance - How power flows, including processes and documents
- Operations - How we organize our activities
- Platforms - The online spaces we use and manage
- Tutorials - Guides for how to do things on Social.coop
- Meta - Wiki pages about the wiki!
Working groups
- Organizing Circle (OC)
- coordinates efforts between the working groups and catches anything that does not cleanly fall into work group domains.
- Community Working Group (CWG)
- moderates our Mastodon instance, coordinates with other instances, and looks for ways to build intra-social.coop community. This group generally maintains a budget for moderator stipends.
- Tech Working Group (TWG)
- maintains our instances and generally tends our tech stack. This group generally maintains a budget for tech services.
- Legal Working Group (LWG)
- mitigates legal risk to our volunteers and organization. This group will maintain a budget for legal and professional consultations.
- Finance Working Group (FWG)
- Finance Working Group issues reimbursements to cover expenses as well as develops annual spending and budgeting reports.
Common questions
1. Are there any coop jobs available to me? How do I find out about those?
There are a number of working groups involved in the Operations of the coop - check them out at that link. We intend to rotate in members regularly to prevent burnout, so please reach out to any group you are interested in participating in.
2. How do I ask a meta-question about the server or propose a change to Social.coop policy?
Great question! When and how to use Threads, Polls, and Proposals
3. Where does all the money go?
Our budget was outlined and discussed in Loomio. As of writing, less than a 1/3 of funds go to stipends for various Operations groups, a little less than that is contributed to allied cooperative and technology projects (determined by the Finance Working Group .) The rest is split between reserves and hosting the server, paying for Loomio, Meet.coop, and other Platforms.
4. Is this instance based in the US or somewhere else?
Our Platforms page says our hosting is Hetzner, which appears to be based in Germany.
5. What's the Matrix chat thing and should I be on that?
Matrix is an open chat network, where we have a few rooms that you might be interested in. In particular, the Open Chatroom hosts a small amount of meta talk about the coop, and the tech chat is probably where to go if the server is down and you want to see what is happening.
About this wiki
This wiki is maintained by Social.coop's working groups and ops teams. Members are welcome to make an account and contribute. Please register with the same username you use on Social.coop.
TODOs for this wiki
- Migrate Tech Working Group content
- Enable multi-theme support so it renders in an accessible way on mobile
- Document setup steps in the wiki proper, currently these are at https://anagora.org/wiki-migration
- Test coop-cloud-based backups/restores