Notices by Mx. Aria Stewart (aredridel@kolektiva.social), page 3

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

@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.

@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.

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?

I wish people more deeply understood that the thing measured is not the thing itself, basically ever.

@iarna A team, choosing of its members own volition to use many of these tools? Might in fact do amazing things with them, light and agile, but that's because the power structure is not in conflict with the goal or anyone's humanity.

But the moment it's trying to coerce more work out of workers, which it always does when there's adverse power structure, it turns into this. And that's the key to the deception: if you ignore the power structure it all seems fine.

@iarna Cosigning this so hard. Not to knock actual agility, but "agile" and especially "Agile" with a capital A, are exactly about micromanagement and fungibility. They are specifically designed to empower management (in the guise of planning) and disempower workers (in the form of alienation from the work itself, replaced by arbitrary and sometimes vicious metrics)

It's scientific management all over again.

Fourteen years!

@goatsarah Long distance dial-up here!

@goatsarah i won’t join a community with those rules!

@aurynn Straight up? No.

This is literally admins choosing to end relationships for their users, often with no accountability. If there's actual accountability? then maybe. But there so rarely is.

But not all defederations are the same.

nazis? Bye.
fascists? Bye.
trolling instances? Bye.
mastodon.social? DEAL WITH THE POWER RELATION AND HAVE THE HARD CONVERSATIONS PLEASE. Taking it as defed-or-not is not actually a great starting point for those conversations.
instance whose admin was on vacation for a day and didn't respond fast enough to banning one user who is kinda questionably nasty? Nah. Limit, have conversations, try to build a consensus.

Having to migrate to another server because of spats between admins about people you don't know? That is in fact harmful.

These are our social relationships involved. Damage to them requires accountability for the harm caused.

@aurynn ehhhhh. That doesn’t mean they’ll be appropriately responsible, nor structure those decisions well. It might be a ticket to the negotiation but that’s not really the power relation most admins have with their users.

@aurynn yeah I have not yet seen it in any instance I’d want to be on. I have however been subject to an admin spat twice. Both I was told to go duck myself when I complained. And notably not my admins, so while I have a stake in the outcome, no stake in the decision.

@aurynn actually I find this framing offensive while I guess technically correct. It completely ignores the power dynamics involved.

@thomasfuchs Oh Twitter too.

What the FUCK

The USPS reports on who goes to apply for a passport to REDDIT, FACEBOOK, GOOGLE and SNAPCHAT.

Every layoff is a sign a company was mismanaged, either in who they took money from and became beholden to, or in decisions they made around staffing, or which trend they're chasing now.

Every. Layoff.

@thomasfuchs @lmorchard yeah :D I recognize the layout and roughly the size; if not the same connector than very similar. A screw post though, not the clips on that era of SCSI.

@thomasfuchs @lmorchard Looks a lot like a mini-SCSI connector.

@evan Yeah it's an impossible standard. There's bad stuff too, but uh ... that's how the US is structured. Impossible not to be.