Here’s a draft of what I will be posting a bit later. I’m going outside to take advantage of some seasonably nice weather today and will look at posting this a bit later this evening EDT. If there is anything that people want changed, please let me know ASAP (I know it’s short notice).
Blog Post Draft Summary
Happy 2nd Birthday, CoSocial!
Two years ago today, CoSocial opened its virtual doors. This was
after action was taken from the original vision. A lot has happened in
the last two years, and we wanted to share some of that with you:
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We grew from ten members to nearly two hundred members.
-
We upgraded our core Mastodon service multiple times through growth, launched
a Lemmy instance (which was later sunset), launched a
Castopod instance at podcasts.cosocial.ca, and are
continuing to explore Pixelfed. -
We have committed ourselves to not only requiring Canadian data residency for
our services as we have from the beginning, but we are moving to
Canadian-owned service providers. -
We have expanded our support for related organizations through donations to
IFTAS and participation in the Fediverse Governance research.
Our financial situation is solid and we continue to be a small but steady
presence in the Canadian social media landscape. We are
actively recruiting a system administrator, and are discussing the
best ways to responsibly expand access to CoSocial across to Canadians of all
means.
As we collectively explore what we can offer Canadians in terms of
Canadian-owned cooperative social media, members of CoSocial have been
participating in reading groups on the Federated Governance report
(reading group summary) and on Governable Spaces
(just started) so that we can understand how to better provide
governance to CoSocial and assist other Canadian organizations who want to host
their own federated social media services.
In the last year, the TechOps working group added two new volunteers
@john and @swart, bringing the number of volunteers in the
working group to twelve. Our ambitions still exceed our current capacity, but
what we have done in the last twelve months is nothing short of amazing.
CoSocial’s main service continues to be our Mastodon instance at
cosocial.ca, where we have 176 active accounts (48 accounts
added this year) that posted 100,216 posts (18,686 new posts, 50,522 reposts,
and 31,008 replies). Members of CoSocial favourited 141,304 posts, and our
posts were liked 122,673 times by members from other servers.Our database continues to grow and is our single largest technical expense. We
started the year on a 60 GB PostgreSQL cluster and are just about to run out
of space on the 100 GB cluster we’re running today.Mastodon continues to require constant care and feeding, and @mick,
@johannab and @john performed 6 minor upgrades over the
course of the year, as well as one major one (to Mastodon version 4.3) which
required significant effort and planning to pull of successfully.
Looking Ahead: Moving on from Digital Ocean
We’ve been happy with Digital Ocean as our hosting provider since the first
one-click install Droplet was spun up by @boris and we opened the
doors to members two years ago.
As a Canadian co-op, we’ve always made a point of keeping our data in Canadian data centres, but in light of recent hostile behaviour towards Canada from the United States, we feel that in order to preserve the rights of our members to express themselves on the Fediverse and to support Canadian businesses, the time has come to find a new, Canadian-owned and operated provider to host our services.
This move to a new hosting provider will be a significant effort, but it offers
us an opportunity to re-consider and possibly dramatically alter the
architecture of our services to improve their manageability and (possibly) even
reduce their cost of operation. The work to find a suitable new home for our
services has begun, and we’ll have more updates on our progress as it is made in the coming weeks.
If you would like to be involved in this critical effort, please reach out!
Hiring some help
For the past two years, the operation of our servers and services have been a
successful volunteer effort. I am proud to say that we have not had any
unplanned downtime in the past year, and our volunteers have been able to keep
our systems secure and reliable. In order to ensure the stability and long-term
viability of our services, we’re looking to pay someone with the skills
necessary to help keep the lights on, keep things up to date, and keep our
technology moving forward.
As a member-run co-op, we will always be driven by the participation of our
members, but the reliability of our services can’t be entirely dependent on
volunteer efforts. If you or someone you know is looking for a small amount of
side work as a sysadmin, please see our post here and reach out.
More Services, More Growth
When the major work of relocation is behind us, and with some extra hands on
deck to help keep things sailing smoothly, I’m looking forward to building
additional member-run Fediverse services for our members to take advantage of,
as well as streamlining the operations of the co-op to position us for long term
growth. The next year is shaping up to be one of tremendous change, and the need
for safe and reliable places for Canadians to raise their voice and connect with
one another has never been more crucial. I am glad to have had the opportunity
to support our operations and growth this year, and I am excited to take on the
challenges ahead together with you all.