Bonfire folk might be interested in this post I made via Mastodon.

Nobody on the Fediverse seems to have families.Sometimes if you read their profiles they claim to have families but then that claim is almost never reflected in what they post.Likewise, nobody seems to exist in political units at levels lower than the national.I believe that the Fediverse has become a waystation on our way to turning ourselves into bots, a way of rendering us ineffective in what we, with increasing derision, call "the real world".#SeizeTheMeansOfCommunity​

This is the first issue of a four-part newsletter series that seeks to provide some answers to following two questions.

• In addition to asking how cooperatives can do what other firms are doing, also ask what cooperatives can do that other firms can’t.
• In addition to asking what cooperatives can do to support their members, also ask what cooperatives can do to support their members to support each other.

Cooperatives should enable mutually beneficial cooperation between individual members, not just cooperation where members collectively pool their bargaining power together.

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I feel that people putting together new open source, self-hosted social media platforms should be discussing similar questions. What I have seen so far seems mostly like tweaks of the forms of interaction developed by capitalists. As a result, the Fediverse has largely evolved around forms of interaction which elevate individualism and the personal and which understands community to be little more than sheltered/gated forms of limited-scope personal expression, with few tools and fewer inclinations towards communal, collective identity-formation and action.

"Native Land Digital strives to create conversations about the history of colonialism, Indigenous ways of knowing, and settler-Indigenous relations, through educational resources such as our map and Territory Acknowledgement Guide. We strive to go beyond old ways of talking about Indigenous people and to develop a platform where Indigenous communities can represent themselves and their histories on their own terms."

I can't think of online social media setups that both present users with the circumstances and afford them the resources and opportunities which would facilitate social interactions comparable to the ones shown in this film.

Yet I don't think you can call a "community" anything that does not offer an environment in which such tributary interactions can regularly, spontaneously arise.

...it is only from a privileged position in which the certainty of their world is a given that today’s pundits can consider conspiracy theories as cognitive deficiencies that need to be corrected and remain deaf to the existential anxiety they express.

...we should realize that debunking is a distraction, a Whac-A-Mole game for fact-checkers and information watchdogs. Instead, we should address the dearth of political vision on which conspiracism feeds.

(the link is to an online page containing an abstract and metadata. The full article must be downloaded as a PDF.

Abstract

Can decentralized, digitally-enabled movements sustain solidarity over time? What is the role of digital media in such a process? Existing studies point to the tendency of such movements towards fragmentation. We focus on the case the 2019 Anti-ELAB Movement in Hong Kong and one of the primary digital platforms for mobilization, LIHKG. We argue that LIHKG users maintain the dominance of solidarity through a strategy of normative crowding out, whereby users strategically promote solidaristic rhetoric and emotions while sanctioning divisive ones. Empirically, we analyze millions of discussion posts on LIHKG with rich text and emoji data. We first document the rising trend of online solidaristic contents despite contemporaneous tactical radicalization. Regression analyses further show that such a pattern can be produced by user-driven mechanisms in sanctioning solidaristic and divisive contents. This study has implications on the role of digital media and the sustainability of decentralized collective action.

From the full article:

In the Anti-ELAB Movement, we did see decentralization and radicalization trends over time, but we did not observe either diminished commitment or internal conflict due to the establishment of solidarity norms. In other words, the tendency towards fragmentation was counterbalanced by the presence of solidarity norms. We argue that such a creation of norms is one of the affordances of digital media. Before the digital age, it would be difficult to communicate and reach consensus across different groups within decentralized movements. However, the presence of digital media breaks this difficulty. In the Anti-ELAB Movement, participants were able to make extensive communication and coordination before and after launching a protest. While such contact is unlikely to achieve complicated consensus in decision-making extensive and iterative communication exposes users to the constant (re)negotiation of the collective frames of the movement, and makes possible the emergence of new protest norms. However, we caution that the norm-generating function is an affordance rather than an essence of digital media usage.

This article, while interesting and useful, is (necessarily) limited. "Decentralization", in this article, refers to the structure of the organization IRL, not to the social platform -- which seems to be some variation on Reddit or, perhaps, Discourse. Indeed, federation of posts might have been unnecessarily dangerous at worst, irrelevant and unnecessary at best.

Since, at least on first skim, the authors don't seem to have gone deep into consideration of alternative social media models it is interesting to ask whether how it might be possible to design an online platform that moves norm-generation and consensus-negotiation further along the spectrum from "affordance" to "essence".

The point in an online microblogging exchange [elsewhere, not on Bonfire] where I am moved to invoke "Quine", "ostension", "inscrutability of reference", "Lakoff", and "prototype effects" is the point at which I find it necessary to tell myself to slowly back away from the keyboard ...

I have a suggestion for Bonfire: Neither clicking on a hashtag under "Trending topics" nor searching for the hashtag in the search box brings up any results, even for hashtags I have used in my own posts.@BonfireBuilders #bonfire_feedback

If you and your community have not invested serious energy taking advantage of the internet revolution -- if you do not have a concrete set of norms, practices and institutions designed to allow you to use the internet without the internet using you -- you are destined to lose. In fact, you’re not even trying to win.

The “thick liberalism” of the past centuries has been rendered obsolete by new media technologies. The groups who can harness the internet for their own ends will decide what comes next.

This article (which you may have encountered before), first published in 1969 and added to in 2000, should be of interest to anyone who wants to think about non-capitalist perspectives on community, hierarchy, egalitarianism, and the commons.

#seizethemeansofcommunity

It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam

people are enervated not just by the Sisyphean pointlessness of their individual labors but also by the fact that they’re working in and for a society in which, increasingly, they have zero faith or investment. The future their elders are preparing to bequeath to them is one that reflects the fondest hopes of the same ignorant bigots a lot of them fled their hometowns to escape. American conservatism, which is demographically terminal and knows it, is acting like a moribund billionaire adding sadistic codicils to his will.

Everyone knows how productive you can be when you’re avoiding something. We are currently experiencing the civilizational equivalent of that anxiety you feel when you have something due the next day that you haven’t even started thinking about and yet still you sit there, helplessly watching whole seasons of mediocre TV or compulsively clicking through quintillions of memes even as your brain screams at you — the same way we scream at our politicians about guns and abortion and climate change — to dosomething.

I'm guessing you know this already, given your warnings about Federation not yet being enabled, but just in case not"I encountered this issue while using Bonfire: The function update/4 in module Elixir.Ecto.Repo.Schema didn't receive data in a format it can recognise: @BonfireBuilders #bonfire_feedback sentry.io/organizations/bonf...

As far as I'm concerned, talking about "Post-growth entrepreneurship" is a little like talking about "Non-lethal assassination"...You need to re-examine your terms and the systems of assumptions and associations which enable those terms to be meaningful.

I'm 70 years old. I've concluded that when I use the word "community" most people don't interpret it to fully mean what I intend.I attribute this to decades of a semantic "hollowing out" of the term, supported by mass media, appropriation by a host of snake-oil business consultancies, and accelerated by online social platforms.By and large, when I invoke the need to #seizethemeansofcommunity I am pointed in the direction of various tools and platforms that support and promote associations.

Internet Archive Seeks Summary Judgment in Federal Lawsuit Filed By Publishing Companies

“Should we stop libraries from owning and lending books? No,” said Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian. “We need libraries to be independent and strong, now more than ever, in a time of misinformation and challenges to democracy. That’s why we are defending the rights of libraries to serve our patrons where they are, online.”

Humans seem close to providing strong evidencethat the things we value most highly about ourselves as a species,i.e. our: - Capacity for extensive, elaborated symbolic meaning - Consciousness - Morality - Individuality - Imagination - Innovation - Prosociality - Culture - Faith - Preference for influence over coercionare not robust adaptive strategies from an evolutionary point of view. It seems increasingly likely that our time on this planet will be far shorter than many other species' have been.We are turning out to be an evolutionary flash-in-the-pan

You cannot develop a full, rich, robust communityif your paramount concern is to programmatically thwart bad actors.If you don't believe that the trust and good will engenderedamong a manageable number of comradeswho collectively undertake communal interactions and collective actionsis enough to prevent the triumph of bad actorsthen you have deemed the project of community doomed at the outset.

How many online "communities" would be better described as online "associations"?Community should be distinguished from association. The distinction is fundamentally one of commitment and identity. Associations, even while they provide their own form of social glue, make little claim on our loyalties and at best make minor contributions to our identities.from The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like An Economist Undermines Communityby Stephen A. Marglin#seizethemeansofcommunity​

While the multiplicity and scale of digital media effectively brought the age of consensus to an end, it did not return us to an age of common sense. There is no imagined community to encompass the body politic, and our perceptual capacities are still untethered from our bodies. The worlds we now inhabit are digitized realms incapable by their nature and design of generating a broadly shared experience of reality.