Comment by jszymborski
2 years ago
If:
1 - Cooperatives excite you and
2 - You use social media
you might want to look at the social.coop Mastodon instance (or cosocial.ca if you're Canadian).
Not only has the community on both those sites been a breath of total fresh air for me, I am not worried about the server I'm on having decide between disappearing and selling ads, and I feel like I'm partaking in a social enterprise.
Just recently social.coop had an open vote on how to donate some of our surplus to the open software we use and organizations that promote cooperation. It's been so nice to see and be apart of.
Beware of social washing to justify higher costs.
cosocial.ca charges CA$50 for its annual membership. Omg.lol charges $20/year for Mastodon and a bunch of services and for $29/year, I can offer Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix and Funkwhale, with 250GB of storage.
It's not "social washing" if it's actually a working co-operative.
We all collectively own the funds, and if we ever want to lower yearly rates or pay our members dividends from surpluses, members are free to put it to a vote.
Part of the reason we run a surplus is to deal with any unexpected costs (they don't just scale with users, but also the popularity of users on our server), but FWIW I think we should open up a pay-what-you-can tier much like social.coop has. Thanks for reminding me, I'll send it to the coop for consideration.
What would be the point of "paying dividends from surpluses", if the funds are getting in and out of the same (collective) pockets?
And if "everyone" owns the coop, then why do you need to get the surplus in the first place? Seems to be it would be just fine to say "Every month we run a report of the total expenses, and every member pays an equal share".
9 replies →
That's neat! How is it funded?
By the members; we all pay a tiny bit into the co-op each month. Most people pay 1 USD or GBP per month, if you use some of the other services we offer through organizational memberships in other co-ops (ie. we're a member of meet.coop for video calls, May First Co-op for Nextcloud and email and what not, etc.) then some people pay a bit more (normally no more than 3 to 5 USD or GBP).