![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alyazatoday's blog post is disorganized and short, but is a thumbnail sketch of why i think confederal models are severely underrated online. the catalyst for this belief begins with this observation by Viktor Lofgren in his blog Marginalia:
If you want to absolutely destroy a website that is all about building communities and meeting new people, then aim for the site and all communities to always be growing as much as possible. Make that a design goal of the site. Pump those subscriber numbers up. What you’ll get is a place where everyone is a stranger, where being a jerk is the norm, where there is no sense of belonging, where civility and arguing in good faith is irrelevant because you’re not talking to someone, you’re performing in front of an audience to make the number next to your comment go up so you can briefly feel something that almost resembles belonging and shared values.
when we talk about communities online, what virtually all of us mean are shared, predictable, stable common spaces organized around commonalities. i don't think i need to tell you, reader, that infinite—and especially sudden—growth is completely anathema to this. to adapt a phrase, it effectively acts to dissolve the people and elect another. infinite growth can only rob a space of any sense of stability, and deny it the natural ability to incorporate and assimilate newcomers—this denial is what underpins the Eternal September phenomenon.
so, this would seem to imply out best energies are placed toward smaller communities which will not be subject to this (or at least are much less likely to fall victim to it). but many of us still find large-scale communities and platforms useful—it's social media so we generally want to be where people actually are at least some of the time. how do we square the circle here, then? this is where i think confederal models come in.
what i think we need, desperately, are groupings of communities with shared (and democratically deliberated) bounds, purpose, goals, and ideals. the sense of mass-connection in such a case would then be derived not from throwing the door open and blowing up any common purpose but from being able to interface with a larger network of people where and when you want to do that. Mastodon at its best take a very similar form to this idea, and federated services in general make this far more possible as we continue through the 2020s. (but Mastodon i should caveat is also full of places which are not like that, and institutionally it isn't particularly confederal except in the extremely nebulous sense of "everyone here is committing to decentralization.")
this is in large part the premise of Website League as it currently exists and, in particular, my minifesto for a democratic website confederation (draft) which currently serves as a lot of its ideological justification.
(hopefully, i'll be able to get around to a fuller explanation at some point in the near future. but i want to put the idea out there, and i don't think i ever put the minifesto in my RSS feed. consider it your homework for the week or something.)