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   Mx. Aria Stewart (aredridel@kolektiva.social)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Aug-2023 23:43:00 JST Mx. Aria Stewart

   • Aral Balkan

   I'm thinking of @aral's small web ideas (which are very good! Go read about them!), but there are two forces in play that I never see discussed well in the context of small web, decentralization, and federation:

   - quite a lot of existing stuff takes quite a lot of know-how to make go, and all the simplifications take quite a lot of power from people, or at least _raise_ the barrier to learning how to manage it more deeply
   - a lot of stuff is better at the community or family level than the individual. Lots of software affects multiple people.

   How do we manage community software in a healthy way too?

   And how do we keep that technical know-how required from giving the nerdiest among us either a ballooning responsibility ... or some possibly undeserved (or at least unhealthy) power over others?

   We're running into this on the fediverse: single user mastodon instances are not as useful as multi-user ones in many cases, and there's a much bigger curve to making it work well.

   We see "admin drama" and "defederation drama" regularly: but this is not just a symptom of bad federation decisions and controlling mindsets, but power structures that concentrate power and responsibility on people quite likely unable to bear it. (the legal landscape does this even more, but most instance admins are at this point ignoring that. The risk _is_ acceptably low to do so, I think. Not ideal, but workable.)

   What _are_ the healthy structures, covenants, and responsibilities?

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Aug-2023 23:42:59 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @aredridel Thanks, Aria :)

     From the perspective of the Small Web, in terms of what I’m working towards, at least, you will be able to set up your own Small Web place without any technical knowledge in under a minute. You won’t need technical knowledge to maintain it either.

     (If we fail at this, then we’ve failed. The goal isn’t to create yet more toys for geeks. We already have loads.)

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Aug-2023 23:48:08 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @aredridel
     Regarding community: The way I see it, communities are made up of people. The goal of the Small Web is to enable people to organise communities without sacrificing their human rights or surrendering their personhood to third parties.

     Imagine if the price for running a local meetup was that the pub owner got to read your mind. That’s basically the cost of taking part in a community today with Facebook, etc., under surveillance capitalism. All I want to do is remove that restriction.

   • Embed this notice
     Mx. Aria Stewart (aredridel@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:01:31 JST Mx. Aria Stewart

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan

     @aral Yeah. As someone who's run communities _outside_ the big corporate tech space, I think there's there's other parts needed: the equivalent of third space (if first space is the small web, analagous to one's home, and second space the workplace, or corporate structure, then third space is the community space, a place to exist outside both, a big part of the public sphere.)

     And in both sides of the analogy, second space has taken way too much from us: ideally we'd disassemble the concept we have of the workplace and the corporate internet both into much more communal, small-scale overlapping structures rather than large scale fiefdoms.

     But just as much as that's what healthy looks like, any union organizer can tell you to watch out for small business owners. They get vicious as much or more than the corporate sorts. Community servers can have the same flavors of drama and unhealthy power structures. The entrenched few with power can defend it with quite a lot of might.

     But there's still value in collective things, not just individual.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:01:31 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @aredridel It’s an interesting one. In a lot of ways, I feel we’re where we are because we fundamentally misunderstand what public space is in a digital network. We’re used to public space being a place: a park, let’s say, because that’s what we know from our experiences in the physical world. But the way I see it, public space in a digital network is made up of the interconnections between individually owned and controlled places. In other words, it’s not a place, it’s the web of relationships.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:13:18 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @aredridel I’m not sure I’m doing a great job of explaining what I mean. Here’s an example:

     If I want to organise a weekly meetup in physical space, I publicly announce it and then people are interested join up and we start building a community around a shared interest.

     On the Small Web, I’d announce that on aral.small-web.org and maybe you (aria.kollektiva.social, maybe) would join the group and so would other folks, all from their own domains and the group would be formed.

   • Embed this notice
     Mx. Aria Stewart (aredridel@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:13:19 JST Mx. Aria Stewart

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan

     @aral Hmm. I think I disagree, rather strongly — because relationships in aggregate, if dense enough, form something new. Community is an emergent property, but it's a thing on its own, semi-independent. We saw how fragile the peer-to-peer relationships only was when the blogosphere was harnessed into the social media machine.

     I've always been fond of online places, and thought we needed more of them. But the forces of centralization and corporatization sure made a mess of it. Reddit is such a stunning example of both good and bad. So much hate lived there in some communities; but communities there existed somewhat independent of reddit. Their level of editorial control was fascinatingly hands-off for the most part. Ultimately the power structure poisons it, but I don't think the flaw is in it being place-like, just in governance gone bad.

     I think the biggest problem is that communities _do_ have some boundaries, and that's good. Shared identity is one aspect that's hard to replicate with just a network of relationships. Sometimes this makes cliques of exclusion, but also it can build solidarity and a sense of collective purpose.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:16:13 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @aredridel (The main difference to the centralised web is who owns and controls the means of communication. In the former, it’s corporations like Facebook, etc. On the Small Web it’s individuals. The only difference is that with one we need Facebook because they have the tools by which we can form and maintain our communities whereas with the Small Web – fingers crossed – we’ll all have the tools with which to do so.

     (And thanks for this conversation. It’s a very important one.)

     💕

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:17:50 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @aredridel As I see it, the people who comprise it.

   • Embed this notice
     Mx. Aria Stewart (aredridel@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:17:51 JST Mx. Aria Stewart

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan

     @aral Makes sense. The question then is, what is "the group"?

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     Mx. Aria Stewart (aredridel@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:22:34 JST Mx. Aria Stewart

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan

     @aral Actually, going deeper here: in the case of like the Salem SWAG group, I delegate to the others of the group that they can speak for me, in the context of that group. I'm okay with us, collectively, saying things on behalf of us all. We are specifically trying to act in unity. We don't always agree, and we work together to figure out what to do and say, but we are putting up a unified front. And not just all of us saying the same things in our respective spaces, but actually together, as a group.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:22:34 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @aredridel Yep. And I’d love to explore how we can model such interactions on the Small Web. Nothing about it should preclude that sort of use :)

     All the Small Web does is to model the person with the same rights/boundaries we have in physical space (rights and boundaries we lack when we’re on someone else’s space). So my hope is that it will support emergent behaviour and that we will use it to interact in the myriad of ways that we do in physical space. All while keeping everything opt-in.

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     Mx. Aria Stewart (aredridel@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:25:36 JST Mx. Aria Stewart

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan

     @aral There's two test cases I'm thinking about right now:

     in 1997, I ran a wiki for unschooled teenagers. It eventually bit-rotted, and the reins never got handed off properly. (the technical barriers were too high), but but it was collectively managed for the most part. That was super successful until it aged. It was such a solid sense of community, and people often posted pseudonymously, there were no accounts (very 1997 there...), spam was collectively erased. There was a lot of good there. Trying to replicate anything like that today would be really hard, both for external background toxicity reasons, but also technical shape of things is really different now.

     And the other is our local "Salem Safe Walking Advisory Group" — right now, the infrastructure is owned by the person who started the group, and if anything ever happens to her, the group will cease to exist. But it's not something that would get sustaining power from being embedded in my and the other organizers social media space. It's something that demands an identity of its own, shared.

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     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:25:36 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @aredridel Bookmarking this too so I have it to refer to as this is invaluable. I’d really love it if I could involve you in playing with all this once some of the higher-level bits start becoming usable. The use cases you’re raises are definitely ones I want us to be aware of as this develops. This is all really helpful, Aria, thank you :)

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     Mx. Aria Stewart (aredridel@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:26:41 JST Mx. Aria Stewart

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan

     @aral You're welcome! I know I'm disagreeing but I don't want to be antagonistic at all here. This is such important stuff and nobody's really solved it or even come up with truly solid ways to describe some of it. We're stabbing in the dark at some of the stuff capitalism has done the most damage to in our society, trying to bring it into the light.

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     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:26:41 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @aredridel No, not at all. I appreciate your taking the time to share your experience and your concerns.

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     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:30:23 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @aredridel 💕

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     Mx. Aria Stewart (aredridel@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 00:30:24 JST Mx. Aria Stewart

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan

     @aral Ping me any time! I love thinking about this stuff, and I'm willing to help be a foil to make things be more deeply considered!