CoSocialism Update

This week we had our CoSocial AGM and it came off just fine. I regularly tell the world that Mastodon is the only good choice for social media going forward, and I think it’s worth a few extra words on why the CoSocial model is interesting, and what it teaches. What’s CoSocial? The long story is here, but in brief: CoSocial is a registered Canadian nonprofit co-operative that operates the CoSocial.ca Mastodon instance. It’s limited to Canadian residents and citizens, and membership costs C$50/year. It only has a bit over 200 members but is growing. The service has good availability and performance. Judging by the people who turned up for the AGM, our members seem generally pretty happy. Why it matters I think CoSocial represents a plausible model of the future of social media: Decentralized, self-funding, affordable, reliable, self-governed, transparent, and free of advertisers, scammers and trolls. What we’ve learned Some of these are obvious, but others only emerge from a couple…