Northsky Newsletter: Update #2

We’re excited to bring you another Newsletter as we approach launching Northsky. This time we’ll be covering:

• Our Cooperative Structure
• A Note about Comms
• Prepping for PDS Migration

Our Cooperative Structure

In order to ensure that Northsky Social remains a stable platform for the 2SLGBTQIA+ community long term, we’ve gone to great lengths to set up a democratic, consensus-driven, and charitable cooperative in Canada. We’re committed to giving our community a level of care and reliability that we’re often not accustomed to receiving, because we (like you) are tired of having to start over constantly and losing community members in the process.

Setting up a stable and democratic structure is more difficult than you might imagine! For example, Canada requires that all incorporated entities have a board of directors, which often implies a level of hierarchical control that didn't align with our values as a cooperative. As such, we’ve set up a structure where the elected directors delegate most of their authority to a group of active coop members call the Member Operations Group (MOG, for short). This allows democratic quorum-based decision making when it comes to the cooperative’s strategy, with the Directors providing an oversight layer to ratify these decisions and ensure the coop is in compliance with the laws of Canada.

This leaves the Directors of Northsky Social little actual control of the organisation as their duties are dictated by the Cooperative Rules which are ratified by the MOG, typically the only power they wield is related to dispute resolution or issues dealing with violations of the Cooperative Rules or Law.

The Members Operation Group meets weekly, and we sync on volunteer tasks and progress, as well as make proposals and vote on them to determine our strategic goals. This sounds like it might slow things down a bit, and it does sometimes when a decision requires a lot of discussion and consensus building, but it means that we’re moving forward in a unified and strong way, as a group. Furthermore, the MOG delegates certain day-to-day operational authority to these sub-groups: Cooperative Development, Engineering, and Community.

These subgroups are made of of various members of the coop, and also non-member volunteers, who have expertise in these areas. They are trusted to make tactical decisions related to day to day operations and to elevate decisions to the MOG that warrant coop-wide approval. This further delegation of trust lets us move faster on our pre-established democratically-decided goals. When it comes to our voting/ratification process, every active member is given one vote meaning that regardless of position within Northsky Social, your vote means as much as that of any other person.

We’re also trialing a few volunteers to help us build out our volunteer management processes before we take on more help. This is a lot of work and includes building an employee handbook, a pathway to membership for volunteers, and securing insurance for the cooperative. It’s necessary so that Northsky can continue to remain democratic, safe from wreckers and outside interference, and be sustainable as an organization long into the future.

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A Note about Coop Communications

Anytime you hear from us via this newsletter or top-level @transrights.northsky.social posts (not replies), it has been signed off on by the broader cooperative! And while you will hear from our Directors on occasion, they are not the trilateral voice of the cooperative. As a social media cooperative, we know our members might have outspoken opinions on things that don’t necessarily reflect the will of the entire group, and that goes for our directors too.

That’s why all official communication comes from cooperative accounts, and our members and directors are free to have opinions outside of official cooperative decisions, whether they be dissenting, agreeing, or extrapolating. Dialogue is an important value for our cooperative and community, and we’re not going to prevent our members or our directors from speaking their minds even if it diverges from the official stance of the cooperative.

If you want to get in touch for any reason, you can find our contact info at the end of this Newsletter. We’re always happy to take feedback from users of Northsky and external folks who are offering good faith critique.

Preparing for Migration to our PDS

This month saw the launch of Blacksky’s own PDS hosting initiative! We’re so proud of Rudy and his team for taking this big leap in becoming a multi-tenant host, and we’re excited to be not far behind. We’ve been watching their launch eagerly and learning everything we can to make PDS migrations even smoother for our debut! The more community PDSes that join the AT Protocol ecosystem, the better and safer we’ll all be from a centralized attack on Bluesky (be it of a technical or regulatory nature).

In our previous newsletter we shared how we had come to choose our cloud provider and progress on phase 1 of the Northsky Social. We’re happy to share that we are nearing readiness to start hosting users! We still don’t have a solid date, as we are an all volunteer org, but as soon as we do we will let you know, and scream it to all the skies above!

As mentioned before, our top priority is protecting our users from regulatory attacks on the 2SLGBTQIA+ community whether from the Trump administration or other entities. In order to do that, our first launch will be our Personal Data Server (PDS) hosted in Canada. To support this, we had a short list of additional requirements beyond just self-hosting:

• PDS Migration Tool
• Robust PDS Infrastructure
• Incorporation as a Limited Liability entity
• Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
• Cyber Insurance

Migration Tool

To allow you, our users, to have your data hosted on Northsky Social, you will need to migrate all your data from Bluesky (or self-hosted) PDS to ours. We’re in the final stage of completing out Migration Tool that will make it swift and easy to migrate to our server. There will be a Downloadable Tool and also a hosted Website that will make it easy to migrate in a way that is comfortable for you. (Privacy / security nuts, you’ll especially appreciate the downloadable version, so all data backups and key generation happens locally on your computer.)

Part of this migration process, that no other migration tools (to date) have included in their workflows, will generate a Recovery Key for you so that you can recover your AT Proto identity in the event of a “hostile exit” scenario from Northsky. This key is very important, so we recommend storing it in a secure and backed up location like a password manager. Empowered with this key, even WE won’t be able to hold your data and identity hostage! You’ll be free to leave Northsky as you please and migrate somewhere else! (Although at the time of writing, Bluesky still hasn’t made it possible to migrate BACK to their PDSes, so you’d have to host your own, or move to another 3rd party provider.)

We will publish additional content to explain this process and address questions around data portability when we are about to begin migration! We’re working on both a video as a high-level explainer and documentation that is more technical and in-depth (for the sickos).

The second one, and in a manner most important, is the infrastructure to operate the PDS! As we shared before, we’ll be operating on Kubernetes in OVHCloud and while we started with a simple VPS are going with this setup for greater flexibility so that we can accommodate for our growth and be able to make improvements without risk of unintended disruptions. As we bring everything online we will be keep a close eye on the operations so that any issues can be resolved quickly as users join when we start sending out invites to those on our wait list.

Should we see political pressure in Canada akin to what is occurring in the US and UK, we will be able to migrate Northsky to another region within OVHCloud without a massive migration effort thanks to the benefits of a containerized architecture where we only need to explicitly deal with migrating backups (in the event this is required we will proactively communicate such a significant change with expected timeframes).

In the event that we need to abandon OVHCloud completely, this will continue to be achievable with the main caveat of it taking a little longer to setup a Kubernetes cluster on a provider that aligns with our requirements however we have high confidence that such a shift will be much faster than the first setup. The ultimate priority will be the continued safety of our users and keeping the community together through these times.

Legal Compliance

Part of what makes hosting Northsky more complicated than setting up a personal PDS, is that we’re looking after the data and safety of multiple users, not just ourselves! In order to do this the right way, we needed to ensure we were incorporated as a limited liability business entity, and had the proper paperwork and insurance in place.

For a time, the technical aspects of Northsky were much farther ahead than the business aspects, but now both are aligning as we approach launch. We have incorporated, we’ve had a lawyer work with us to draft clear and fair Terms of Service and Privacy Policy documents for our users, and we’re about to activate our customized insurance plan for the Cooperative, which includes D&O and Cyber insurance. (We’re not going to expound more on that because it’s pretty boring, but NECESSARY, stuff!)

You can preview draft versions of the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy here.

Chat with us!

We want to hear from you! As we build out Northsky and think about the future, we want to know what things you're interested in having us build. There are no guarantees we will build any of these, but we want to hear from you what's top of mind.

You can get in touch with us in these ways:

Start a discussion on GitHub: https://github.com/orgs/NorthskySocial/discussions (good for proposals, FAQs, and feature requests)

Skeet at us @transrights.northsky.social on Bluesky.

E-mail us at community@northskysocial.com​

Support w/ a Donation

Donations are gratefully accepted, but are currently not tax deductible. All donations do directly to the coop to pay our infrastructure costs and help us keep the lights on!

What’s next?

Our next update will be going into further detail on our technical stack and our approach to engineering for Northsky. Hopefully it won’t melt any of your brains!

Chat again soon,

The Northsky Team