This is the first issue of a four-part newsletter series that seeks to provide some answers to following two questions.

• In addition to asking how cooperatives can do what other firms are doing, also ask what cooperatives can do that other firms can’t.
• In addition to asking what cooperatives can do to support their members, also ask what cooperatives can do to support their members to support each other.

Cooperatives should enable mutually beneficial cooperation between individual members, not just cooperation where members collectively pool their bargaining power together.

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I feel that people putting together new open source, self-hosted social media platforms should be discussing similar questions. What I have seen so far seems mostly like tweaks of the forms of interaction developed by capitalists. As a result, the Fediverse has largely evolved around forms of interaction which elevate individualism and the personal and which understands community to be little more than sheltered/gated forms of limited-scope personal expression, with few tools and fewer inclinations towards communal, collective identity-formation and action.