Notices by 🫧 Social coding commons (smallcircles@social.coop)

@eest9 @silverpill

I think in practice things will go towards hybrid decentralization. A healthy mix of p2p and federated apps and services. Whatever is most appropriate for a certain use case, group of people, or region in the world.

Update: cross-post with silverpill, same gist :)

@dansup @sovtechfund

Congratulations Daniel! Let's forward those standards!! 💪 😃

@cwebber @andrewrk

Great talk. "We must believe that Humanity is generally good".

This is the premise of Social experience design (SX), in a quite holistic approach.

Scrolling my timeline this morning, like most mornings, I found the black pill, the doom and gloom we project to each other to tell about the state of apocalypse.

Our real bad actors are a tiny minority, but they win and keep winning, because we let them. The majority of us are common everyday people, sharing very similar basic needs. Have aspirations to lead a meaningful life. We want to be involved with positive, uplifting things, follow passions, unleash our creativity.

Software should serve that. Coding is social. We have to learn how to cocreate and create works that leave positive societal imprint. Joyful creation!

Fediverse is full of activists. Awareness-raising. But that's just the tip of the spear. We need pathways to solutions. The shaft gives impetus. We need only follow dreams.

https://coding.social/blog/fediverse-of-dreams

@evan

It depends on context. A generic category word, similar to web and internet, when referring to the technology side. An online social networking environment for people when referring to the socio-cultural side.

@evan @siliconsjang @hongminhee

Delighted to mention that #SiliconBeest has been added to delightful fediverse experience curated list..

https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116973510439074056

@HistoPol @vowe

There's a campaign against these glasses, who have a great sticker, but also a good discussion on proper use cases for people with visual impairments. See:

https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116912693079475641

@Em0nM4stodon @index @zackwhittaker

Dutch campaign calls them "Gluurbrillen", voyeur glasses.. https://banray.eu/en

cc @StopdeGluurbril

There's a great sticker. It can be hung in official places and look official, not an activist sticker someone puts there that quickly gets removed.

@evan thanks! Gotta be patient then. Have lotsa fun at the event!!

@evan @bmann.ca @cwebber @dholms.at

No livestreams I think?

@dansup @Floppy

What other names could that paper have created had it been written couple years later?

Gotti Social
Frodo Mark
Smith Irene
...

:blobhyperthink:

@cwebber

What the Epstein class, the fascists, oligarchs and power brokers, and their sycophants do, is similar to very effective Russian propaganda tactics. Create as many variations of the truth as possible, insert alternative facts and narratives, conspiracy theories, sow chaos everywhere. Wearing people out, have them wade through info overloads of doom & gloom, encounter red meat for internal fights, divide and conquer them. And use the Big Tech platforms and LLM disruption as superweapons. We are overwhelmed, can't deal with it. And that is exactly the point.

It only works if we let them. The real evil actors that are driving all this is but a tiny group. We must realize that.

Most people are like you and me, with similar basic needs, we crave simple happy and prosperous life, together with others. A vast majority able to do uplifting, positive things, especially together, united we're a superpower able to move mountains. Make the world a better place.

https://coding.social/blog/fediverse-of-dreams

@jens @bkuhn

> It's an arms race, and one side has the funding for it. Hint: it's not us

Wasn't the flaw here? Shouldn't the FLOSS movement have been seeking sustainability for its 'peasants' from the very start?

I've been fondly quoting that Harvard study finding that (F(L))OSS contributes 9 trillion to the global economy. Yet its an unsustainable burnout zone for anyone who seeks to eek out a living in it. In the past I've said that dabbling in this movement feels like "burning ones privilege at the altar of sacrifice". Another way to look at it is that 99.9% of FOSS is really 'hobby projects' for those who can afford it.

Then the notion of "working in public" is imho flawed. After my years in the space it left me with uncomfortable questions.

https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116316524763055082

Just throwing new tech out into society is no different than what the opponent does, but does it more smartly and unscrupulously.

It's a pity, perhaps too late for me, but I'd love to explore "working in commons".

@jens @bkuhn

Note, and I must state this explicitly, that I'm not blaming any individual participant in the FOSS movement, where most people are doing their stinking best with noble - varying between the more mythical, or less mythical kinds - Robin Hood motives being their intrinsic motivational drivers. To do good for society.

The issues arise by Emergence i.e. in-the-large where the net impact on society may not be so positive. Where the individualism in FOSS where everyone goes it alone, or in tiny groups does not contribute to a sustainable economy, where the indivuals' ethics, morals, and values can be held high. Value is directly inserted in larger society, which works on the basis of hypercapitalism. The emergent FOSS movement can't escape Conway's Law that way.

A Big Industry analogy intrigues me, which can uphold hypercomplex global supply chains, whereas the typical FOSS project has trouble scaling beyond a handful of people. We must be able to organize our supply chains.

@jens @bkuhn

The TLDR is that imho the movement should be much more about people, than about the product that rolls off the production pipeline, i.e. the software. Coding is social.

Let FOSS be code + a protective license. SOSS then is the sustainable production facility, where many SOSS initiatives participate in the formation of a larger and growing commons based value economy. Doing service development, delivery, and exchange with other parties based on trust and proven track records. Creating a fitness formula that is better able to hold the bad actors at bay. Ideally this formula is such that bad actors push themselves out of collaborative arrangements, and become intrinsically motivated to adopt better and more sustainable practices, in order to reap most benefit from their commons participation.

@jens

> I'm already more than ready for the next thing. But it'd hurt some libertarians' feelings.

Jens, we spoke at length about these things in the past. I am very curious about your vision on the future of our movement.

@bkuhn

@jens @bagder @onepict @abucci @bkuhn

Nice! Aligns well to SX, which is about sustainable evolution and organic growth on a basis of "Joyful creation" - an SX formula - within a commons. I like MOSS.

For the M in MOSS you might pick Mutualistic. In the narrative LOSS vs MOSS you force people in a political activist role via the L, which is I think unnecessary in a time where aware people already carry the weight of the world on their shoulder.

SX with Hedonic peer production revolves around finding intrinsic motivations on why people participate and stick around.

SOSS conveys "Save our souls" urgency, yet keywords are "sustainable social". It's about expectation management and good communication is key. It keeps FOSS as-is: code + a license, but focuses for it to be "commons based" i.e. created with a sustainability-first approach and respecting intrinsic values of Humanity and Freedom.

FSDL ensures accounting for changing Needs of direct and indirect stakeholders at any one time.

@jens @bagder @onepict @abucci @bkuhn

For SX I formulated CALM culture, for "Constructive activism-led movements", which goes from the notion that activism is a process going through awareness, attraction, activation, and engagement in a commons. Goal is to take people on a path of solution-orientation where they are empowered to act, work on positive and uplifting things.

Many forms of activism remain stuck in awareness stage, in the way they demand people to adopt the activist's political view. They demand 'sacrifice' to also become an activist, while this is not for everyone. It is a burden.

I never use the word "capitalism" as it gets me in pointless discussion with people throwing theory books at me, saying free markets are perfect. Observed reality is what matters. So I always use "hypercapitalism" insted, capitalism-run-amok.

LOSS will see people come fiercely "I'm NOT Libertarian" and rebuttal of "But you are". Which I think will drag things sideways from the central theme.

@whvholst @jens @bagder @onepict @abucci @bkuhn

Yes, any such requirement make the license not open source compliant.

I think generally speaking we put too much weight on the license alone, and should recognize that it only offers small measure of protection against bad actors and undesirable exploitation of a creator's work.

SX defines "working in commons" as an extension to working in public. What is a commons? It's a group of people who have things in common: who share a particular set of values they hold dear.

The codebase is just a set of plaintext artifacts that roll off the end of an intricate delivery pipeline. Let it be FOSS and publicly available (perhaps less easy to discover for the bad actor).

Where the work happens, where the knowledge is shared, where people learn about each other's needs, where they share their dreams and team up to realize them. That is the commons.

And that is the place that can be shielded protected environment that holds the bad actors at bay.

@innocentzero @ricci

Just had the most horrifying UX parsing this thread in Mastodon's microblog feed, likely causing 10x more network overhead than needed, and replied to @cwebber quote:

https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116792896530026124

Stepping away from ATProto vs. AP I was most intrigued by @dialecticalmusings comment:

> People arguing about moderation and community building often have fundamentally differing visions for the political economy of the Fediverse, but those differences never get unpacked, so people end up talking past each other.

What is never answered well is: What is fediverse? I'd argue it is just a common utility word like internet and web, denoting a communication medium.

What do you do with this medium is then the next question. Well, the power of ActivityPub allows us "to extend constructs of society online" to support our daily needs.

But on the basis of some warped microblog abstraction turned into a pretzel by bolting on features to hang everything off, this is not possible.

@cwebber

I mentioned often how the way we accepted the fediverse to evolve, via post-facto interoperability, continually introduces protocol decay. Resulting in an app-centric fedi that represents more of a universal microblogging environment, with a range of abstractions being introduced besides the instance.

As you say, there's only actors. My observation is that fediverse-we-have side-tracked from ActivityPub, losing much of its versatility and power, and that a course correction is in order for current fedi to be on track again towards becoming the Future of Social networking.

> My biggest regret

This is not a past station. A proper grassroots standardization process should be able to guide evolution in healthy direction. My conclusion is that fedi is currently at an inflection point where it chooses its future: back to original power, or a glorified distributed microblog.

I put my concerns, thoughts on solutions, and a brainstorm in a lengthy article:

https://coding.social/blog/grassroots-evolution