I’m not going to argue that the fediverse is bad.

[nullnowhere@sakurajima.social]

I’m not going to argue that the fediverse is bad. It’s good to create a space that is not controlled by crypto-fascists and tech oligarchs.

But I think in a lot of ways I feel we’re settling. We’re often recreating their spaces and their organization. Except for smaller units, they are often indistinguishable. Some of this is mandatory (especially with legal liability), but I wonder if (and strongly suspect “yes”) we can do better.

It may not seem important, but the same system has a way of creating the same outcomes.

[Kichae]

Oh, this is one of those things I’ve been perpetually frustrated by around here. I think I’ve probably ranted at you about this in the past, even. The fact that all people seem to want out of these platforms is “Twitter, but more complicated” and “Reddit, but with more authoritarian communists” represents a deep failure of imagination.

I gave up a couple of years ago on convincing people that we’re using the wrong mental model for community building, but I really, really wish we had more websites-as-communities, like how forums were back in the day, and that the inter-website communication was the secondary feature. But people seem really stuck on the idea of a wildly less efficient simulacrum of centralized platforms for some reason.

[nullnowhere@sakurajima.social]

@kichae@wanderingadventure.party It's a thought I've been having recur for years at this point, so I would not be surprised if we spoke of it. The reason this is on my mind again is that I am (very) slowly making my way through a book on the subject called "Governable Spaces"
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/governable-spaces/paper

a deep failure of imagination.

Completely.

had more websites-as-communities, like how forums were back in the day

There is this implicit bias that success correlates to mass adoption, which I think is highly flawed. The focus should be on the community one creates AND the space those community members live in. But even more so than that, I believe that forums are also a kind of 'settling', just one we did a long time ago. Like the fediverse, facebook, etc, they create a space where authoritarian modes of community are normal, and thus, normalize authoritarianism.

Users of these platforms do not 'self organize' for anything, because inherently, there is not really anything for them to obtain. Admins and their mods are the first and final say for anything. Some of this is inescapable - without considerable time and resources to create something like a nonprofit, someone has to own the legal liability, someone has to have a root login with our current structure.

But I feel like we could get better, and create software which treats this as the abnormal situation rather than the expected, and even reverse some of these trends. The current model at the end, still creates an authoritarian space of consumers, just while making it difficult for nazis to control the whole space. Which ok, is better, but is like you said, lacking imagination.