The Purpose of Social.Coop?
Matthew Cropp
Public
Seen by 64
I’ve been listening, discussing both privately and publicly, and reflecting a great deal as the controversies of the past week have roiled Social.Coop. There are many elements and dynamics that could be dissected ad nauseum, but I want to focus here on one thing that I think it’s essential that we clarify if we are to pick up the pieces in one way or another and move forward: our purpose.
In the beginning of the instance, the implicit purpose was broad but sufficient: an experiment in building and operating a user-self-governed co-op instance to challenge the hegemony of surveillance capitalist social media. In ways that, in retrospect, mirror some of my experiences with the Occupy movement in ‘11-’12, this broad, ambiguous purpose allowed people with diverse, and perhaps contradictory, goals to see space for them within the project, and our community began to grow.
This worked for a time when stakes were low and the level of trust was supplemented by the many relationships that people brought with them from the co-op and platform co-op movements, from which the lion’s share of early members were drawn. However, as the stakes grew as new members joined and established significant Fediverse networks from their social.coop accounts, tensions between un- or semi-articulated understandings of social.coop’s purpose began to rise, and the recent controversies have surfaced a number of them into clear view.
The three that have become apparent to me are outlined below, and I’m sure that there are others. My strategic question is whether these purposes can continue to exist under a singular umbrella, or if it would be healthy/necessary to fork into more than one co-op instance, with existing members welcome to choose the one that suits their needs best (or to join more than one)?
Collective v. Representative Governance
This question of whether a strongly participatory and flat form of governance is core to the project has come up off and on since the project began. A few months back I started this thread in the Governance/Legal working group expressing my sense of the need for a board-like body to handle our scaling. It was greeted by a mixed reaction, with Mayel expressing that if such a thing were adopted he would view the project as having failed. As such, I tabled the issue and focused my efforts on getting the Community Working Group moving towards a functional operations team.
Early in the present controversy, I decided to take a straw-poll on the question, and the results revealed a cleavage in our community. Of the 47 respondents, 46.8% were for a board or board-like entity, 38.3% were against, and 14.89% were neutral. This clearly is an issue around which there is no strong unified “sense of the co-op”; rather, there are significant blocs of members who support each approach.
Subject-Specific “Common Bond” v. General Membership
The question of whether the target membership of social.coop is co-op practitioners or a more general population was explored a bit in this thread about 6 months ago, and Leo recently lauched this poll asking about the desirability of more co-op-related content.
Talking to folks who recently joined (and some who subsequently left), a common reason for joining because the idea of a cooperative instance appealed to them, but their primary purpose for being here was not co-op shop-talk.
Whether we exist for the former or the latter both has a big influence on how much scale we need to plan for (a few thousand v. potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of users), as well as how much community norms can be expected to influence member behavior.
Relational v. Rule-Based/Administrative Moderation
In the code of conduct development process, there was definitely some tension between the desire to create a set of clear, enforceable rules, and spelling out what has been referred to as “soft” conflict resolution strategies. Upon reflection, I think this seems to have come from a desire on the part of some members for social.coop to be an “intentional community” of sorts, in which, beyond agreeing to abide by a set of standards, members consent to relate to each other in ways thought or hoped to be more deeply transformational.
One way that this tension seemed to come to a head in the recent controversies was around the perception that including such language places potentially onerous expectations on marginalized people who desire a clearly articulated plan for keeping them safe, not a more ambiguous framework for a form of deep/transformative participation/communication.
While we’ve not had a poll to explore this particular question, it does appear to be an issue where some members would prefer to trust a form of administrative justice as a primary tool of the co-op, while others desire a more intentional community approach where such tools are used as a last resort.
Two Possible Ways Forward (among others):
- Reform Social Co-op: Looks pretty much like what Michele has proposed in his recent open letter. A body with strong, intentional diversity is s/elected to steward the re-launch, and one of its roles is to define the ‘why’ of social.coop in light of the above tensions and other factors before re-opening the instance to new members.
- Fork Social Co-op: The most obvious “successor co-ops” I can conceive of would be a Collective, Subject-Specific, Relational instance, and a Representative, Rules-Based, General Membership instance. However, the reality would almost certainly be more complex, so rather than defining the potential successor instances, if a fork is the desired path, we would need a process by which teams could propose their forks, and through which the financial resources of social.coop could be divided up among those proposals that garner a critical mass of support.
I’m still processing all that’s happened, and want to emphasize that the above list(s) are in no way exhaustive. I’m very interested to hear others thoughts.
I do feel strongly, though, that unless we can define a clear answer to the why? of social.coop, it’ll be difficult to chart a viable path from here.
Noah Thu 13 Sep 2018 1:36PM
Well, then maybe you and I would not be compatible partners in running a hosting company, Strypey. I didn't say everyone would be forced to involve themselves in every moderation discussion, I said that I personally would feel some level responsibility for the content created on my platform (It's clear that this is a minority position in tech, but unclear whether the Tech WG or this hypothetical spun-off co-op would fall somewhere towards my end of the spectrum or in the mainstream doctrine of "I just provide a platform"). If I were designing a hosting platform for something like Mastodon, I'd probably start with some baseline rules and model policies for instances I hosted. Maybe there's no market for something like that, I don't know. I do wonder how masto.host handles the possibility of hosted instances federating with instances that share illegal content (CP, etc). Seems like "we're just a platform" would be a complicated position to hold anyway.
Bob Haugen Thu 13 Sep 2018 1:53PM
We're in possibly yet another position. We only develop software with and for organizations we like, and do get somewhat involved in their discussions, but not so much to take responsibility for them or to interfere (very much - tho interacting does affect them) but to interact, ask questions, see where they're going, see if we want to continue, etc etc.
We don't even think about market share.
Noah Thu 13 Sep 2018 2:17PM
In my day job I am a very pedestrian freelance developer/sysadmin; I do try to steer people towards accessibility, inclusivity, etc and away from abusive patterns, unnecessary tracking, that sort of thing... over time I've been able to get more picky with my clientele while still getting the bills paid; it's a hard line to try to walk. It's easy for me to speak about a hypothetical co-op being picky because I'd only personally be building something like that off of my existing level of security from ongoing contracts.
Bob Haugen Thu 13 Sep 2018 2:29PM
@noahhall we're in a very different position there, too. Retired, downsized radically, living on US social security, no burn rate. So we feel very lucky and understand that younger people will have very different constraints.
Noah Thu 13 Sep 2018 2:51PM
followup on "i wonder what masto.host does" -- here is their ToS, if anyone's interested https://masto.host/tos/
Danyl Strype Thu 13 Sep 2018 6:06PM
@bobhaugen
As compared to "maybe some of the tech workers might want to be involved in some of the groups that use their code"?
Just to be clear, this sub-thread is talking about hosting not programming. To answer your question though, it is impossible to release software under a free code license and control what anyone else does with it. That's the whole point of these licenses! To defend the freedoms of software (re-)users, software developers have to be free of liability for all downstream use.
@noahhall
I personally would feel some level responsibility for the content created on my platform
Sure, I have no problem with a hosting coop that has standards applying to all its customers, based on values and principles shared by all the workers in the coop (eg 'we don't host white supremacist groups' would be a no-brainer). But having agreed to host an instance for a group, I would treat that instance as private property of that group, governed by their members and rules, not ours. If compelling evidence was presented that white supremacists were organizing on an instance we were told was for anti-racist organizing, that would be breach of contract, and their instance would be deleted from our servers according to a published process, with a mechanism for appeal in case of misinformation. Otherwise, what goes on in their instance, and how they govern and manage it, is none of the host's business.
"It's clear that [taking responsibility for content] is a minority position in tech"
There are very good reasons for the industry norm that hosting organizations are common carriers, like the entities that operate services as part of the telephone networks. If a coop hosting an instance has to take responsibility for the content on that instance, by the same logic, so does their upstream host (the virtual hosting service providing our VMs or containers), and so does their upstream host (the datacentre their service runs on), and theirs (the telecom corporations that provide net connections to datacentres). In other words, telecoms corporations would get to govern every piece of content on the net, and have to operate massive censorship bureaus to decide what is and isn't allowed on the net.
If the operators of the cables can just say "we just provide access, the customer is responsible for what they say and do with it", as telephone companies do, so can the datacentre, and the virtual hosting company, and so can the instance hosting company. That way, responsibility and power over what gets said is delegated to the end user, or a democratic collective sharing a site of end use, which is where it ought to be on a democratic internet.
Noah Fri 14 Sep 2018 1:10AM
If a coop hosting an instance has to take responsibility for the content on that instance, by the same logic, so does their upstream host
You seem really concerned about being forced to do something, but I haven't said anything about forcing anyone to do anything, and the way you keep inserting that assumption that people will be forced to do something they don't want to do is making me feel like there's not much else worth saying here that I haven't already said.
I do think this sub-thread serves as a very useful case-in-point for my original statement that carving out a separate hosting co-op would not resolve any of these arguments but merely displace them.
Danyl Strype Wed 26 Sep 2018 4:32PM
I guess I'm just failing to understand why you meant by "some level of responsibility". My understanding of being responsible is being able to be held accountable ie. taking responsibility is an obligation (you're forced to as a matter of policy). It's not fair for someone who is held accountable for something to have no power over it. So having "some responsibility" for the use of the hosted platform has to be interpreted is 'having some power over' clients' use of the server they pay you to host for them. My previous comment about "common carriers" was an attempt to explain why I think that's a bad idea. Is there another way of understanding "some responsibility" that I'm missing?
I think we're also talking past each other on what counts as "my platform". If I am a member of the coop being hosted, it's my platform (ours collectively). If I'm being paid to host a coop's servers as a commercial contract, it's their platform. Keeping that platform maintained and working is my business, and maybe making sure it doesn't break my hosting coop's Terms of Use (as I said in my first comment). What rules they make for their servers, and how they enforce them, is their business, not mine.
Matt Noyes Fri 7 Sep 2018 5:09PM
In the words of Al Green, "Let's stay together." I think we are on the right track. The difficulties we are encountering (generating?) are valuable and meaningful. They offer us opportunities to go further, to embrace pluralism and difference and debate while at the same time, developing new practices of dialogue and consensus building. As the Zapatistas say "we want a world where many worlds can fit (Un mundo dónde quepan muchos mundos)". I want coop talk and pics of bunnies. I want witches and tech folks. I want cooperativists and solidarity economy activists. I want active, engaged cooperative nerds and people who like the coop platform and participate in governance as necessary. Let's keep building this platform, exploring new combinations and formats -- no need to answer the "purpose of social.coop" let's just keep asking question, better.
Bob Haugen · Thu 13 Sep 2018 11:13AM
@strypey I'm not sure who "you" was in your comment. Did somebody want to the force the tech workers to get into all the discussions? As compared to "maybe some of the tech workers might want to be involved in some of the groups that use their code"?