from Loomio
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 a token 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's might be 2x more work to maintain 10 instances compared to 1, not 10x), and so will wait for some feedback before posting starting any polls.
Dan Phiffer
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