Zef Hemel
@zef@hachyderm.io  ·  activity timestamp yesterday

Idea 1: I’ve come to believe that groups of people cannot scale to large sizes nicely. Communities, organizations beyond some size (probably 100-200) inevitably falter. Trust breaks down, social connections cannot be maintained to large scales. Rather than trying to fix this (which I don’t think we can), let’s accept it and double down on this fact by creating many more small communities. Likely interest based, or local. You can be part of many such communities and have an “identity” for each separately. We’d keep these communities private and isolated though. So no federation, and that sort of thing.
Zef Hemel
@zef@hachyderm.io  ·  activity timestamp yesterday

Idea 2: the goal is to enable communities of trust. This is also why community size will effectively need to be bounded somehow. Not sure if this needs to be enforced or somehow emerges. The most sensible idea I have for building a trust system is to make communities invite only, and to have clear traceability about who invited whom. This could create some sort of natural accountability system in case people start to misbehave (“who invited this person?”).
Zef Hemel
@zef@hachyderm.io  ·  activity timestamp yesterday

Idea 3: identity. I’m not sure if there should be incentive to “prove your identity” or not. Perhaps this would be up to the community purpose. In some there may be value in explicitly remaining anonymous, in others not. How much effort should be putting in each of these sides of the spectrum, I’m not sure. Perhaps behavior around how much you share (you can imagine an elaborate profile page, with more or less field marked required or somehow verified depending on the case).

Either way since identity should not be shared between communities (no: login with Facebook here), I think this would diversified approaches depending on the community purpose in question.
In #Flancia we'll meet
@flancian@social.coop  ·  activity timestamp yesterday
@zef this just sounds sad to me; a bit like giving up on the internet altogether. Why do we believe such extreme measures of isolation are needed? There is a cost to extreme security at the expense of everything else, as we know e.g. from software. Maybe some groups need this (unfortunately), but it sounds like a suboptimal default.
Zef Hemel
@zef@hachyderm.io  ·  activity timestamp yesterday

Idea 5: incentives. I think social networks are making the world worse by reinforcing the importance of external validation. How many upvotes did I get, how many likes? How many points do I have? Things like engagement farming, link baiting should be an absolute no no in such communities. Of course, reputation has always been a thing for humanity, but I think it emerges naturally and doesn’t benefit from too much “support” from the system. At some point you naturally identify the leaders based on their contributions rather than points, titles etc. So perhaps either there should be no such mechanisms, or only minor ones. I think there is value in “low effort“ appreciation like a star of acknowledgement can be nice. Perhaps only visible to the poster to avoid turning it into a competition.