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TheDude @sh.itjust.works

Our Intentions to join Fedecan

Hey all,

Today, I’m writing to share our intention to join Fedecan, a Canadian not-for-profit organization committed to supporting the Fediverse. We believe this partnership will foster collaboration among like-minded individuals who share a common goal: to create a safe, welcoming space where people can connect freely.

Together we will help deliver a fast, reliable, and consistent experience for all and continue to be free from corporate influence and guided by the values of openness, community, and trust.

Who is Fedecan

Fedecan is a registered non-profit organization based in Canada, with the goal to provide a safe and welcoming space for people to connect with each other on the Fediverse. More information can be found here.

You may also know them by their Canadian lemmy instance lemmy.ca.

What does this mean for sh.itjust.works?

From the outside everything will stay much the same, especially with the admin team. Internally, we will collaborate on tasks related to non-profit compliance, policies, banking and common infrastructure elements such as backup/disaster recovery infrastructure. We will continue to operate separate equipment and instances in geographically isolated locations under different names. We will work towards aligning on safety and security practices in order to ensure that data is secure.

From an organizational structure, sh.itjust.works will fall under the Fedecan umbrella and will share common bylaws, policies, methodologies on best practices, security and legal considerations.

Where do donations go?

Donations to sh.itjust.works will continue to support our mission and objectives exclusively. However, users will also have the option to donate directly to Fedecan, which will allocate funds amongst its projects including sh.itjust.works. Operational costs related to running the non-profit will be shared among projects and these expenses will be transparently disclosed in annual reports published on the Fedecan website.

Option to withdrawal

sh.itjust.works will have the right to withdraw from the Fedecan umbrella should our mutual goals no longer be aligned. In such a case, a predefined provision and action plan will be in place to ensure a smooth transition back to independence.

Why Now?

As the Fediverse continues to grow, we believe it's important to collaborate more closely with others who share our values. Joining Fedecan allows us to do just that, strengthening our operation through a non-profit while staying true to our mission.

Timeline / Next Steps

Over the coming weeks, we'll begin the process of integrating with Fedecan on the organization side. You won't notice many changes but we'll keep you informed throughout the process.

Looking Ahead

We’re excited about this next chapter and the opportunities it brings. By joining forces, we’re reinforcing our commitment to the Fediverse and to the principles that brought us all together in the first place—openness, community, transparency, and trust.

Our core mission remains unchanged. We're still independent in spirit and practice and we remain committed to being a space that's not driven by profit, but by people.

I invite your questions or concerns on this thread or on our https://matrix.to/#/#sh.itjust.works:matrix.org)

Stay connected,

--The sh.itjust.works and Fedecan Team

Lemmy.ca's Main Community @lemmy.ca
Shadow @lemmy.ca
Sh.itjust.works

Our Intentions to join Fedecan
sh.itjust.works Main Community @sh.itjust.works
TheDude @sh.itjust.works

Our Intentions to join Fedecan
89 comments

  • Seems like a no-brainer & an all-round win-win, given that you already align closely on many fronts.

    These two statements could use some hair-splitting though (emphasis mine):

    Donations to sh.itjust.works will continue to support our mission and objectives exclusively.

    Operational costs related to running the non-profit will be shared among projects and these expenses will be transparently disclosed in annual reports published on the Fedecan website.

    Would donations to sh.itjust.works support the instance exclusively as per the first quote? Or as a Fedecan project, would those donations to sh.itjust.works backfeed into Fedecan in some way as per the second quote?

    Will you make public the action plan for withdrawal when it is prepared?

    I'm not a user here (nor a contributor) - just looking for clarification :)

    • I think Fedecan donations go toward shared infrastructure expenses and projects, while sh.itjust.works donations go toward SJW expenses exclusively.

      sh.itjust.works donations would go toward shared experiences expenses to some extent, but not other Fedecan projects.

      I'm not part of the project though, that's just my interpretation.

  • I'm not inherently against this, but what benefit does this bring users of either instance (or Fedecan)? It seems like teaming up in this way (sort of) goes against the whole decentralized nature of the fediverse.

    As a extreme example that hopefully never happens, a decade or so from now, every federated Lemmy instance could be under the umbrella of Fedecan, and it could leverage its power and not federate with new instances at all, making it no better or different than Reddit, and making it difficult for any new Lemmy server to gain traction.

    • I don't expect users to notice much. This mostly just helps SJW avoid duplication of effort that we've already done, things like setting up proper banking / donation systems, etc. They're also welcome to leave at any time, if they feel we're no longer going in the same direction.

      We're not merging sites / stacks or anything like that but we will likely collaborate more, simply to save each other time and energy. Since we are all just volunteers, that's really helpful.

    • Copying my comment for the second bit

      I appreciate that people are asking about this since we want to future-proof things as much as possible. Being vigilant is a good thing :)

      As for our plans around that, what I'm thinking is

      • we can be transparent about everything that is going on, and publicly share as much as possible, so that people can look for issues with this organization
      • overtime if we can set up more guides about what we learned and how we're set up, and open source technical things that we make ourselves, so that it'll be easier for new organizations and instances to pop up

    • Or ban certain topics, policy now vs policy decade from now.

  • Seems like a smart idea. In the UK the Online Safety Act is catching a lot of small websites that can't afford to comply with rules that should just be targeting the big companies. Stuff like that could easily happen in Canada.

    A group like this should make it easier to make everyone's voice heard to say ideas like that are bad. When, inevitably, they do end up passing, it makes it possible to share legal or insurance costs when they become necessary.

  • […] sh.itjust.works will fall under the Fedecan umbrella and will share common […] policies

    Does this mean changes to the ToS, defederation practices, etc.?

    • Our Terms of Service will be likely be reviewed in the future, but our core philosophy of “don’t get us in trouble” will stay the same. We’ve always believed that the actions of a few shouldn’t negatively impact the experience for everyone else—and that belief still stands.

      When it comes to defederation, we handle it on a case-by-case basis. We only consider it under very specific circumstances, or if there’s a clear mandate from the community. For example, we may choose to defederate from an instance if it's causing harm or violating our rules, especially if their admin team is unresponsive or unreachable.

      Whenever we do take such action, we usually start a discussion with the community to keep everyone informed. In fact, this has happened recently—you can read more about it here.

  • BTW, just in case you want a different domain, not saying you do, but I gave feddit.ca to the admins a couple of years ago. 😊

  • Looking forward to this. I have been adding bits and pieces to their wiki/guides at https://fedecan.ca/en/ too, as i think having guides related to the fediverse is a must have.

  • This is awesome news!

    This way you can do much more with the teams as you’re no longer held back with duplicate organizational paperwork freeing up potential resources in kickstarting potential Canadian Piefed, Friendica, Peertube and Matrix instances 🥳

89 comments