mastodon and coops

or: why social.coop gets it right

i write more about my relationship with mastodon here

i am sure i’m not the first to write about how there’s a direct link between the federated social web and cooperative business ideologies. there’s a clear line to be drawn between the idea of a social network run and participated in by the people who own it, with each instance working together to create a bigger and better network, and a business run and participated in etc.

social.coop is, obviously, a manifestation of this confluence. a platform coop-run instance of mastodon, they substitute loomio for the github issues tracker that mastodon development uses, and their wiki is about the instance rather than the software — but in many ways, abstractly, it’s the same thing.

Good Good Work talks about a future where we’re not a design and technology coop, but rather, a network of all different types of coops. we talk about having a pod1 in denver, and one in the northeast, and a traveling one, all working together to build a better future — and there’s no reason why the pods have to work on the web, or even technology. it’s a huge vision of a big network inside of a bigger network of coops, and by now, you should be able to see where this is going.

mastodon is not a cooperative business, and there are instances that are specifically capitalist0, but that doesn’t mean that mastodon is not cooperative. how can you not be, when your whole point is to federate.


  1. a self-governing group within the overarching Good Good Work coop [return]