Starting with the posted link and in more recent discussions of Standardising on ActivityPub Groups I have been advocating for some time to make “Community” a native concept of the Fediverse. Something that better represents communities in the real world: groups and individuals with intricate social relationships between them.
Why?
The following toot by @cicatriz_jdr provides one reason:
“”… and these ‘instances’ are all on separate servers, so it’s totally decentralized. but posts on one instance ‘federate’ with other instances, except when they don’t, which basically half the time. now here’s where it gets tricky…“”
And the follow-up by @throwawaygiraffoid is more hilarious even:
“THERAPIST: And those ““instances”” are they ““federating”” with us right now?”
With a community-native fedi you can avoid talking on the INFRASTRUCTURE level…
Fediverse: Peopleverse!
“Yes, the Fediverse is an online world-wide social space where there are numerous communities where you can meet people. They all have different themes and activities and you just join where lies your interest. Or create your own community for your friends and family on whatever has your passion.”
To explain why the fediverse is such a nice place, I like to say that it is made up of communities that have their own rules and keep their own neighbourhood clean. That also explains why we have less problems with moderation than a global monopolistic platform, but that may not be a good opening sentence. The disadvantage is that you then have to additionally explain that you can still talk to (almost) anyone. For explaining how it works technically, the email system is really helpful.
I have one suggestion.
The fediverse is run by communities. The distributed web is run by people.
We should call the distributed web the peopleverse.
Centralized web: Segregated web
Decentralized web and distributed web: Social commons
Decentralized web: Community controlled web
Distributed web: People controlled web
