Intentional communities

2020-06-12

This post is inspired by a thread on fedi[1] that began as a question about non-electron scuttlebutt clients but quickly became about more than that. Specifically, these toots:

@acdw

> is there any way to have decentralized ephemeral networking without rampant abuse though? I don't know. Not that ssb's model is good, though. I don't think I'll bother with trying to get back on.

@siina

> Intentional communities and tools to remove content you personally don't want to see? See also: fediverse.

> It is arguable that there's rampant abuse here too, just as there is everywhere that large sums of people converge online.

> I do not think you can remove abuse so much as built tools to mitigate it, if you want anything larger than small intentional communities. There are simply too many varying world views.

> I don't think anybody has come up with a viable solution for this question: fedi, while useful, is far, far, far from perfect. That goes for ssb and other current decentralised systems.

whole thread here

Back up

The first time I came across the term "intentional community" was when I sublet a room between semesters at NAU. The guy who was renting the room interviewed me with his housemate and they talked a lot about how the house was an "intentional community," since they were in a Master's program about community building, or something like it (it's been a while since this happened). In that house, it didn't really end up that way -- the other guy ended up moving out due to some arguments he had with other housemates, and I wasn't really there because I was spending most of my time at my girlfriend's (now wife's) place. But I admit that at that time, and for a while afterward, I had a pretty low opinion of "intentional community" types, since I'd only met people who seemed weird and petty about the whole thing.

Gradually, though, I began to understand the importance of intentionality in communities, mostly through just thinking it through. Now that I'm writing this post, I realize I need to do more research in the area, but things that immediately come to my mind include

Pet, by Akwaeke Emezi

The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin

both of which are novels, but I already said I needed to do more research!

A move toward intentionality

This all goes to say that @siina's reply made a lot of sense to me, and I've been pretty consistently moving toward more intentional spaces online over the past few years. I've switched Facebook and Twitter (though I never really *got* Twitter, but I was on there a little) for Mastodon; I've gotten into the tildeverse and tildes.net, which is an unrelated reimagining of something like Reddit; and of course, I'm posting this in geminispace, which is possibly my favorite right now (which I'm sure has something to do with me writing a client for it).

I suppose the question becomes, *Why Gemini but not Secure Scuttlebutt?* After all, this whole thing started with a question about whether there are any non-electron scuttlebutt applications (to which the answer is, sadly, no). I think it might have something to do with what I replied to @siina, which is the toot that made me realize I wanted to write this post:

> ... After all, abuse and impersonation aren't technological problems, but social ones.

As far as I can tell, SSB was written and is used exclusively to break away from the centralization of resources online. Every client keeps a record of every interaction they've had themselves, for an extremely resilient communications network. However, because their goals are resilience and decentralization, SSB community members lose the benefits of centralization, namely a multiplicity of truths and the ability of arbitration. Anything you say on SSB, remains said for all time. It's impossible to remove anything from the distributed ledger because doing so would break all future transactions. While this is good in some ways (I can see political or public speech entered in an immutable ledger as an accountability measure), it means that users have no right to be forgotten. I think that SSB tries to solve social problems with technology. It's really interesting technology, but it's still just that.

Contrast with the Gemini protocol. I've been on the mailing list for a few weeks now, as well as reading around the geminispace, and it seems that the protocol benefits from a few things:

a small and insular user base. I would be remiss if I didn't mention this, because community size is directly mentioned in the toot-thread cited above. As Geminispace gets larger, it's totally possible that it'll become a hotbed of assholes. I hope not, but you never know.

an emphasis on human scale. The spec is expressly written to be able to be held in the head. A stated goal is that a client should be written in a weekend. A lot of the talk in the mailing list and around the net is focused on how human users will be able to use the new protocol.

the ease of adoption, which dovetails with my previous point. Because the scale of Gemini is quite small, it's really quite easy to get started and to putz around in the space. It's built on already-existing internet technologies, like URLs, DNS, and TLS, so it looks and feels fairly familiar while providing a novel interaction paradigm. SSB, on the other hand, is completely new, and it's hard (at least the two times I've tried to get involved with it) to find people to interact with/follow, to use the client, and to grok the spec (not that I've really tried -- full disclosure).

Because of its reliance on existing technologies, Geminispace utterances are able to be retracted, just by being deleted from their owners' capsules. While others can, and probably do, scrape and save those utterances for their own use (like HTTP-space), in SSB it's baked directly into the protocol. In a lot of ways, Geminispace is much like the Indieweb in that it's just a bunch of people kind of self-publishing. And that's what I really like about it.

A slight apology

I think this post was possibly a little rambly and all-over-the-place, which is probably due to me taking a lot of phone calls at work and constantly splitting my attention. But I don't really want to edit this, so here it is. I'd love to know what you think.

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