Proposal to take over a Mastodon hosting service, hosting external instances, but also to enable the creation of thematic sister coop-instances
Mayel de Borniol
Public
Seen by 415
I've been put in touch with Alice, who runs the Mastodon hosting service https://maastodon.net (currently hosting 38 instances with 171,652 accounts, including the mothership instance https://mastodon.social) and wants to either find a way to share the workload, or transfer it to another person/group.
Of course, I suggested turning it into a co-op! And here's what she replied (and said I could share here to see if we might be interested):
> I really like that model and can only wish MaaS becomes a coop.
> Financially, the service is slightly profitable, the income over the previous two months was 182€ and 293€. The current servers cost 175€/month (209€ with taxes, it could be lowered with some changes)
> Technically, it works okay but require constant attention (mostly for mastodon.social's traffic bursts).
> It has some custom software that'd I'd be happy to continue working on, in a less pressured context, and see open-source. (i can't guarantee my time without a remuneration, but i would help the migration in any case). It's all already highly automated, including billing and instance setup. Given the right resources and maintenance/scaling it doesn't require much intervention except answering support tickets.
> My main issue with it is that i can't healthily handle such pressure alone, i just feel more and more crushed by a thing that's visibly too heavy.
I think that while Alice might not have the energy to start up a co-op from scratch, she would probably be happy to transfer it to us (we'd give her something as a payout) and become a member of social.coop instead where she could be part of the soon-to-exist Tech Ops team.
It seems to me that this ties in perfectly with our bigger vision for social.coop from the beginning (creating a model for user-controlled social platforms, to then inspire/help others do the same). And now that we've reached 1000 members, the question of scaling is relevant, and I personally think horizontal scaling is preferable (for both technical and social reasons).
We could use a similar model as Q&A service StackExchange for creating new communities (see http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq) which could result in sister instances like art.social.coop, science.social.coop, or even aww.social rather than sticking with one increasingly noisy and general instance.
As for the external instances already hosted by Alice: https://maastodon.net/instances/ they could be a secondary source of funds for social.coop which would help remunerate the ever-more-needed Tech Ops team. Of course, we could then prod the instance admins to see about turning them into #platformcoops (or becoming sister instances of social.coop just like the hypothetical aww.social) Imagine announcing that mastodon.social is now a #platformcoop! It's no #BuyTwitter but still pretty cool :wink:
Another option, in case the whole social.coop collective doesn't want to take this on, woud be to create a small worker-coop to manage maastodon.net and possibly "outsource' the hosting/maintenance of social.coop to that coop.
I'm keen to hear what people think, especially those members for which this would mean extra labour (even though the beauty here is collectivisation of effort, it might be 2x more work to maintain 10 instances compared to 1, not 10x), and so will wait for some feedback before starting any polls.
Graham Wed 2 May 2018 3:12PM
We'd need to undertstand more about the financials, and what the actual daily workload is, but it certianly looks to be an interesting opportunity.
Alan (@alanz) Wed 2 May 2018 3:16PM
It definitely sounds interesting, as long as we have the capacity to manage it.
And the more of Mastodon that gets run on co-op lines the better.
Liaizon Wakest Wed 2 May 2018 3:25PM
this is incredible news and would love to see this move forward. if there is even a slight chance of turning mastodon.social into a coop I think it would be worth it. and even if that instance didn't become one just being able to say that it is managed by a platform coop would be a huge moral booster.
Deleted User Wed 2 May 2018 3:27PM
I really like the idea! Especially it's good to note, that already this hosting service is one of the biggest conglomerations of fediverse in one place, and because it's so easy to set up an instance there, its share is likely to grow even more in the future. Thus making it a coop at this point would be an excellent move to prevent that at some point a big proportion of the fediverse ends up being centralized.
Graham Wed 2 May 2018 4:03PM
The point about preventing a corporate takeover is well made, and an important one.
@h Wed 2 May 2018 3:59PM
This is a great idea. Hopefully Alice will want to stay around with us in some other capacity as well? Think the technical documentation of the system.
Mayel de Borniol Wed 2 May 2018 4:01PM
Yeah I think so :)
Erik Moeller Wed 2 May 2018 4:09PM
Fantastic proposal, thank you for making the connection! social.coop now has an annual budget of >$4,000, and as far as I can tell our spend is pretty low. Working with an experienced instance administrator as part of a larger scaling effort seems to be the right idea at the right time.
One thing to keep in mind: as we scale, we should make sure that at least some of the core sysadmins can get paid a living wage. It's both morally the right thing to do and more sustainable in the long run. So if we work with Alice on this, IMO we should incorporate that into our long term budgetary planning.
Lots to discuss but I'm definitely bookmarking this thread and will post some more thoughts later. Would love for Alice to join us here to discuss!
Mayel de Borniol Wed 2 May 2018 4:14PM
I invited her to join!
David Mynors · Wed 2 May 2018 3:03PM
This sounds like a fantastic project, and I'd be enthusiastic to get involved in some capacity!