Cooperative management of a Mastodon instance by Social.coop
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Global, Social.coop, Online- Where did this use case occur?
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2017 - ongoing- When did this use case occur?
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Social.coop- Who were some of the key collaborators
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300+- How many people participated?
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Cooperative, Internet, Social Platform- What are some keywords?
What was the problem?
Most mainstream social media platforms are run by corporations with centralized ownership and control, predominantly in the hands of tech executives and investors. This consolidation of decision-making power has led to a variety of outcomes that favor profit over the well-being of the communities that use the technology.
How does the community approach the problem?
Social.coop demonstrates an alternative to the mainstream social media corporate monopolies. The cooperative members have set up a democratic governance system used to manage and maintain a Mastodon social media instance. Mastodon is an open-source platform that is owned and maintained by a decentralized network of volunteer developers and users.
What were the results?
• Proof of concept for a cooperatively governed instance of the Fediverse [2]
• Members have collectively, successfully decided on instances to suspend and mute via deliberation and consensus decision-making on Loomio
• The group has been able to maintain 545 active users of the Social.coop instance
How participatory was it?
Empower
The cooperative members spun up organically to design and implement this ownership structure, coordinate the processes, and conduct the maintenance of the instance.
What makes this Use Case unique?
'If we want to move towards a future of the internet that is decentralized, I believe we need to be practicing how to collectively govern the online communities, applications/platforms, and protocols themselves. I believe this use case shows us that cooperative models can be used to actually give community members (and not just admins) control over decisions that affect their shared online spaces.' -Val