Social.coop

I deleted my account on the Mastodon instance social.coop yesterday. I still don’t fully understand what went down, but here’s some details from my perspective that I can point to in case people ask.

Social.coop is/was an experiment in democratic, co-operative social networking that I joined in May 2017. I paid $3/month as a member and return got to participate not only in the social network but help make decisions in their Loomio group.

It was great until recently. As with all groups that don’t have strong leadership, there was a lot of discussion and debate about what seemed like fairly minor things. One critical failure was the time it took to get a code of conduct in place and a policy about when social.coop would block other instances.

There must have been some back story that I’m not aware of, but on Wednesday 29th August I ‘tooted’ that I’d weigh in on Loomio when people stopped arguing. In retrospect, should have posted that directly on Loomio rather than Mastodon. I also posted a few points that I thought were salient, including that I felt that the term ‘nazi’ was a form of shorthand and not specific enough for a policy.

That wasn’t a helpful thing have said and I have apologised for my ignorance.

On Thursday 30th some other Mastodon instances cited my toot as policy of social.coop and, without an explanation (other than “just no”) silenced/blocked the entire social.coop instance.

I was willing to stick around and ride things out as there’s always bumps in the road with democratic experiments. However, people on social.coop started leaving, including key members who provide hosting for the instance. It was clear things weren’t going anywhere.

So, I decided to delete my social.coop account. It’s a real shame, and I’m very sorry that I inadvertently upset people and caused so much drama. Suffice to say I’ve learned a lot from the experience.