More notes on Organizing, Mutual Aid, and Activism on decentralized social networks

Why Community Matters: Groups as the Next Step for the Fediverse

Federated groups in Bonfire will be spaces where communities gather to organise, care, and coordinate across the fediverse. They'll live next to your personal feed, but each group having a specific purpose: a study circle, a lab team, an activist collective, a local mutual aid crew, a project team. Inside you’ll find posts, conversations, calendars, shared resources, and more. Crucially, groups will be portable and interoperable.

Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media

Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.

Medsky

Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.

"Collective Power: Patterns for a Self-Organized Future by Ted J. Rau" [english edition] (ebook) - Sociocracy For All

by Ted Rau Preorder Ebook

Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks

A design pattern to reduce centralized control and change incentives in social networks.

What We Fund - Knight Foundation

Knight Foundation funds four interconnected programs that support thriving communities and is shaped by how information, culture, and civic life intersect.

Nobody cares about decentralization until they do

A recurring line in discussion of federated, decentralized social media is that no one cares about it. They just want their Twitter without the Nazis. Which is okay. But how it looks on the backend matters. When the illusion of a unified user experience breaks, how accessible the escape pod

There is One Fediverse. There are a Million Fediverses.

Over the past several years I’ve listened to admins, mods, and community managers from across the decentralised social media landscape. I’ve been in the chats, attended the conferences,…

Here Comes Everybody (book)

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is a book by Clay Shirky published by Penguin Press in 2008 on the effect of the Internet on modern group dynamics and organization. The author considers examples such as Wikipedia, MySpace, and other social media in his analysis. According to Shirky, the book is about "what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures". The title of the work alludes to HCE, a recurring and central figure in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and considers the impacts of self-organizing movements on culture, politics, and business.

Leaflet, Blogging, and How to Fix Social Media - Aaron Ross Powell

Decentralization, network overlap, and why we should all blog, too.

ATmosphere technology to support organizing and activism

I’m working on a post about anti-surveillance organizing and activism on decentralized social networks, and one of the points I’m going to make is that the ATmosphere offers a lot of Innovative and very useful functionality for organizers that doesn’t exist on centralized social networks today, and complements decentralized implementations of classic social network activism tools like blogs, newsletters, microblogging, live-streaming, etc. Here’s some of the examples I have so far … custom f...

ATmosphere technology to support organizing and activism

I’m working on a post about anti-surveillance organizing and activism on decentralized social networks, and one of the points I’m going to make is that the ATmosphere offers a lot of Innovative and very useful functionality for organizers that doesn’t exist on centralized social networks today, and complements decentralized implementations of classic social network activism tools like blogs, newsletters, microblogging, live-streaming, etc. Here’s some of the examples I have so far … custom f...