This week marks the second anniversary of the launch of the CoSocial.ca Mastodon server, which is one leg of my online presence (the other is this blog.) I’ve never been more convinced that online social interaction has to change paths and take a new direction. And I think CoSocial has lessons to teach about that direction. Here are some.
A personal note: I’ve been fortunate in that bits and pieces of my career have felt like building the future. For example, right now, about the Fediverse generally and CoSocial in particular. In this essay I’ll try to explain why. But it’s a fine feeling.
Decentralized · This is maybe the biggest thing. The Web, by design, is decentralized. You don’t need permission to put up any kind of Web server or service. Social media should follow the decentralized path blazed by the Web and by the world’s oldest and most successful conversational app, namely email. ¶
It seems painfully obvious that a network of thousands or millions of servers, independently operated, sizes ranging from tiny to huge, is inherently more flexible and resilient than having all the conversations owned and operated by one globally-centralized business empire.
To be decentralized, you need a protocol framework so the servers can talk to each other. CoSocial uses ActivityPub, which at the moment I think is the best choice.
Some smart people who like the Bluesky experience are trying to make its AT Protocol work in a way that’s as demonstrably decentralized as ActivityPub is today. Maybe they’ll succeed; then operations like CoSocial should maybe consider it as an alternative. We’ll see.
Not for profit · Our goals do not include enriching any investors. We plan to pay the people who do the work and have just advertised for our first paid position. ¶
We’re not-for-profit because the goals of the investor community are incompatible with a healthy online experience. In 2025, companies are judged on profit growth; everything else is secondary. If you can grow your audience organically, good, but the world is finite, so when you’ve attracted everyone you’re going to, you’re going to have to focus on raising prices and reducing costs. Which is likely to produce an unpleasant experience for the people you serve.
Cory Doctorow aptly uses “enshittification” to describe this often-observed pattern.
A registered co-operative · There are a lot of different ways to set up a not-for-profit. The simplest organization is no organization: Someone buys a domain name, puts up a server, invites people on board, and uses Patreon donations to keep the lights on. ¶
Which is exactly what Chad did at Mstdn.ca, and it seems to be working OK. It’s a testament to the strong fibres of the Web, still there after all these decades of corrupting big money, that you can just do this without asking anyone’s permission, and get away with it.
But we didn’t. We are a registered co-operative in BC, Canada’s westernmost province. It took us a couple of months to pull together the Board and constitution and bylaws. We have to file annual reports and comply with governing legislation.
I am absolutely not going to suggest that a cooperative is the optimal not-for-profit approach. But I am pretty convinced that if you want to be treated as an organic component of civil society, you should work within its frameworks. Plus, it seems to me, on the evidence, that member-owned cooperatives are a pretty great way to organize human activities.
More than a click to join · As I write this, most modern social-media products let you just roll up to the Web site and say “I wanna join”, and they say “click here”. Or even just make a couple of API calls. ¶
We’re not like that. You have to apply for membership and offer a few words about why. Then you have to [*gasp*] pay. A big fifty Canadian dollars a year buys a co-op membership and a Fediverse account. The first year of Fediverse is $40 so we can book $10 of your initial payment as payment for a CoSocial share (refundable if you later cancel).
When you apply, we check that you did so from an IP address in Canada, we glance at your reasons for wanting to join, then if you haven’t already contributed, we send you an email asking you to pony up and, once you have, we let you in.
The whole thing takes maybe five minutes of effort from the new member and a CoSocial moderator.
What matters about this process? The fact that it exists. Nicole the Fediverse Chick can’t get a CoSocial account, nor can any other flavor of low-rent griefer or channer or MAGA chud. Just the fact that you can’t join by calling a few APIs filters out most of the problems, and then being asked to, you know, pay a little money, takes care of the rest.
Which is to say, being a CoSocial moderator is dead easy. Sure, we get reports on our members from time to time. So far, zero have been really worrying. On a small single-digit-number of times, we’ve asked a member to consider the fact that they seem to be irritating some people.
And we throw reports from Hasbara keyboard warriors and similarly non-credible sources on the floor.
The key take-away: Imposing just a little teeny-tiny bit of friction on the onboarding process seems to achieve troll-resistance in one easy step.
Transparent · We have a bank account and credit cards and so on, but we run all our finances through a nice service called OpenCollective. Which makes all our financial moves 100% transparent: Here they are. ¶
No Advertising · CoSocial has none, and never will. ¶
It is a repeating pattern that advertising-supported social-media products offered by for-profit enterprises become engulfed in a tempest of controversy and litigation.
Since it’s axiomatic that centralized social media has to be free to use, ads are required, which means the advertisers are the customers. Those customers will continuously agitate for more intrusive advertising capabilities and for brand protection by avoiding sex, activism, or anything that might make anyone uncomfortable.
I don’t know about you, but I’m interested in sex and activism.
Intellectually, I appreciate that advertising should be a normal facet of a functional economy. How else am I going to find out what’s for sale? But empirically, advertising as it’s done now seems to exert a powerfully corrupting influence.
The only way forward? · I’m not claiming that CoSocial is. But I am arguing strongly for the combination of decentralization, not-for-profit, legal registration, non-zero onboarding friction, transparency, and advertising rejection. There are lots of ways to shape resilient social-media products that do these things. There are other legally regulated non-profit structures that aren’t co-ops. ¶
Also, there are plenty of other organizations that would benefit from hosting social-media voices: Government departments, academic institutions, sports teams, fan clubs, marketing groups, professional societies, videogame platforms, and, well, the list is long.
How’s CoSocial doing? · Slow and steady. We’re tiny, less than 200 strong, but we get a few new members every month. Two years in, a grand total of two members have decided not to renew. ¶
We’ve got a modestly pleasing buildup of money in the bank account, which means that we need to get serious about becoming less volunteer-centric, and thus more resilient.
The service is fun to use, it’s reliable, and about as troll-free as can be. Come on in!
(But only if you’re in Canada and willing to pay a bit.)
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: David Collier-Brown (Apr 06 2025, at 12:59)
Off-topic: You note that it seems necessary for large no-co-ops to use advertising.
In the very first days of the web, we also considered micropayments, but it seemed too hard.
Well, Tim Berners-Lee recently said
“Two myths currently limit our collective imagination: the myth that advertising is the only possible business model for online companies, and the myth that it’s too late to change the way platforms operate.”
It turns out he's right: any company that does ad-auction bids in ths usual 120 milliseconds can deliver micropayments as well.
TL;DR is at https://leaflessca.wordpress.com/2024/12/01/doing-it-righter/
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From: Nelson (Apr 06 2025, at 16:53)
The "pay for account" thing is a pattern I wish I could see more often. Metafilter has had that for 20+ years, it's still just $5. But that's enough to keep a bunch of spammers out.
There's a concern that payment excludes people you want, particularly people who for whatever logistical reason can't manage an online payment of any amount. Metafilter solves that by making it possible to get an account for free, you just have to ask and convince the moderators you mean well.
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From: Matěj Cepl (Apr 07 2025, at 15:15)
I don’t like this trend of demonization of for-profit organizations, no, not every one must be a sleazy WordPress-like (under the current management) thing. I am quite happily hosting my emails with FastMail, and they seem to be working as expected, taking money for providing the service they offered me.
I guess, if there is any valid generalization, it is about high-risk investments and Private equity funds, which seem truly dangerous to anybody’s mental health, but not to the for-profit organizations as whole.
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From: eb (Apr 07 2025, at 22:09)
No offense but. Reminds me of app.net, which back in the day succeeded in building a social network seemingly used primarily by its own client app developers and their friends.
What unifying interest draws people to this network? What kinds of topics would users have in common, if not the funding and organizational structure and decentralization and left-leaning speech restrictions of the network itself?
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