PieFedGovernable Spaces - Democratic Design for Online Life
Rimu
luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.181/
When was the last time you participated in an election for an online group chat or sat on a jury for a dispute about a controversial post? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.” In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences have spread far beyond online spaces themselves. Feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Schneider shows how the internet can learn from governance legacies of the past to become a more democratic medium, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before.
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Snot FlickermanI'm sure it's wonderful but the issues tend to be more *technica*l than *governance*. I'm sorry this will be a wall of text, but please trust me it's worth reading. This problem isn't directly solved as easily as just saying "we need to do it differently."
Even on Lemmy, there isn't a built-in mechanism for coming to consensus other and upvotes/downvotes.
There isn't a built-in mechanism for elections of moderators or admins. Don't even get me started on how it's basically impossible to do for admins. Lemmy at least has the ability for individuals to say "I don't like these admins, I'm spinning up my own instance... with blackjack... and hookers... in fact forget the instance." The problem being you can't vote out an admin when... the server lives on their property and they can just unplug it... when they're the financial backing of the site... and so on.
These are major structural problems in how computers and the internet are designed at their backbone. Those same systems bleed into the way our programs work, too.
The internet is a giant communications hub where flow of data matters, partitioning data matters, and Access Control Lists reign supreme.
It would require so much more technical background work than almost any programmer has been willing to put forth. Even Tildes, a small, unfederated reddit-esque clone made by the bloke who built reddits Automod is still his own feudal feifdom. He has been working on a "reputation" system for years at this point without any clear path towards real democracy. And this guy started the site having read books exactly like this and having written a ton about the same issues himself. Yet he comes to the same technical conclusions that are basically "As an admin, I am the Emperor of Tildes."
Somehow, all the people who read these things still end up with the same conclusions: It's my place, follow my rules or get out.
I've seen exactly one site get it halfway right and that's MetaFilter, and that involved them becoming a non-profit organization and having scheduled elections of board members. The hiring of moderators (who are paid) is still done like a business where you are interviewed and hired and the community doesn't have a ton of input into who gets hired. MetaFilter has been around since 1999 so they've had a lot of time to build this structure, and most of the structure exists *outside* their technical platform itself, which still relies on admins and moderators top-down controls in individual threads. This is the only site I know of where the site servers itself are legally owned by the non-profit, and thus the community, instead of the admin, Jessamyn, who used to own it directly.
From the MeFi non-profit changeover document:
Why is this happening?
For most of its history, the site operated under a single owner/decisionmaker, which was prone to burnout and bottlenecks. A first attempt at reform under a volunteer Steering Committee in 2022 ran into restrictions on volunteerism under the for-profit LLC. Jessamyn decided to pursue a transition to a different structure that would be better suited to community governance. There’s a series of posts on MetaTalk that show all the posts and information as it happened, under the tag MeFiNonProfit; just start from the bottom.
The only reason MeFi was able to achieve this, in my opinion, is having a very invested community for 20+ years. Our community on Lemmy has barely started, and it doesn't include roadblocks for trolls like MeFi does (it costs $5 to open a MeFi account, tying your account to a payment card). How do we ensure our users are actually invested in our communities when it's a free for all to make as many throwaway accounts as you want? (or even worse, spinning up your own server and making hundreds of fake accounts flooding the fediverse)
It's going to take a literal fucking technical genius to build a new system that's not like that. The Mastodon/Lemmy developers are quality programmers, but they are not geniuses creating new types of consensus systems within their technical kingdoms. No, they all still want a level of control over what happens on what they would call "their property." (That' the other aspect, how much is built on property law and the fact that you can *own* a server.)
As I said, probably a great book, but the real issue is every new system being built with the same old top-down admin > mod > user breakdown. Until the technology adapts to a more democratic structure, we can't actually escape this problem and it doesn't seem like Schneier's book is laying out how we can program these new structures other than a seeming reliance on blockchain... which seems superfluous.
SubArcticTundraThank you for all this insight into the problem. I guess it's a shame that it's admin > mod > user although I guess if it's the admins paying for the server it makes sense that they don't want to lose complete control over what goes on in it (which community governance (=democracy) would achieve). Perhaps this would be alleviated if only paying members could vote (like at MeFi I suppose)... but then you'd still have the friction of having to found a nonprofit for it, and the legal work of doing that is not something that the average person, or even geek, knows how to do.
Wugmeister
db0If you're going to tag your title, Do it like [this] or like #this. Clients like tesseract correctly parse and display such tags in their interface.
More democratic structures mean more discussions, votes, etc. This means people with more time will take up all the space. It’s also susceptible to outrage campaigns and similar. This can lead to a community getting preoccupied with meta topics, distracting from the main topic.
It certainly is a risk, but surely there must be ways to counter it...
What can work well is asking the community with surveys and then the mods make a judgement call.
Too much democracy creates a vulnerability to an influx of activists brigading for a cause unrelated to a community’s topic.
A loud minority can drive out a silent majority of users.
Contemporary example is Israel/Palestine. Some subreddits decided to become propaganda echo chambers, others made discussion of the topic against the rules.
I definitely agree that there can be such thing as too much democracy.
More democratic structures mean more discussions, votes, etc.
And what's the problem with that?
It’s also susceptible to outrage campaigns and similar.
That works well in *anti-democratic* societies - you have no proof that it will even be possible to do such in ones that can actually be called *democratic* with a straight face.
The problem is it gives power to those with the most free time on their hands, eg the terminally online. That’s a fraction of users.
I’ve been active in democratically run groups for decades now and it is always an issue.
I am very excited about the possibility of democratically-run communities and instances. We are still building more basic things than that but it is something I think about a lot and hope to run some experiments with this in the future.
Good point: with great power comes great
responsibilityblame.This makes me think about structures that are even more fundamental to the Internet:
- The Domain Name System is inherently hierarchical, and the highest levels are usually controlled by corporations that are much more powerful than I am.
- The process to register a domain name (like piefed.social) requires having a lot of cashflow (it seems that you need to pay many thousands of dollars each year): https://hostadvice.com/blog/domains/how-become-domain-registrar/
- The process to make registrations available with a new top-level domain (like .social or .name) requires having a lot of capital (it seems that you need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars): https://dev.to/kailyons/tutorial-make-your-own-top-level-domain-name-like-com-org-and-net-jhd
Fundamentally, my ability to send a message between China and Argentina or Fiji and Kyrgyzstan is mediated by a relatively small number of people. For example, the ICANN "key ceremony" is probably not easy for me to participate in: https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/the-key-to-the-internet-and-key-ceremonies-an-explainer-11-07-2023-en
I think it'd be hard to maintain connections to people that are far away from me (I don't know people in very many cities, and I certainly don't know enough people or have enough money to lay my own cables or launch my own satellites or set up my own radio towers to enable me to be independent of ICANN). Similarly, I'm not about to set up my own postal service or courier system.