I've been thinking about Tech and Community recently

This will be a kind of stream of consciousness, it might not make a lot of sense.

I was chatting with a friend recently, and the subject of Tech and Community came up. I've been thinking a lot about Lemmy, the federated network it exists on, the ideological nature of instances, building community, maintaining strong and inclusive communities, Parenti's ideas of capitalist encirclement, touching grass, mutual aid, the "Digital Town Square", third spaces, recently.

As working-class people, as wage laborers, as members of physical and digital communities, there must be a way to reorganize our digital social lives so that we can bridge the gap between the global and the local. So much of the "local" is lost in the global digital sea. Hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people all live within the local range of each of us, and yet the platforms we engage with thrust us into communicating with people hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of miles away. Much of this has to do with capital accumulation, you need to centralize as many people into your tent to maximize profits. This, in a way, is a form of capitalist encirclement. Our digital lives, and digital communities, are at the mercy of capitalist rule and often subjected to capitalist discipline.

Facebook, as one of the earliest social media platforms, started with the foundation of "personal network", bridging the physical with the digital connection. The campus was the origin point of these original relations, connecting an entire community of higher ed learners together. Your in group on Facebook was usually your in group in real life. This is reflected in other ways on Facebook, such as the town page. Almost every town has a page on Facebook, where people communicate about local things. On Facebook, you start with yourself, and your network grows based on your personal connections. For a long time, and still today I think, a lot of local mutual aid is done on Facebook. I'm including things like the Buy Nothing pages as mutual aid. Facebook Events has been a tool used by organizers for a long time, allowing for a central place for event updates, directives, addresses, and so on. So Facebook, through its mass adoption, and it's origin point with the self, allowed for more personal community than any other platform online.

That, however, is waning as more people leave the platform, or as more young people never sign up for the platform. Facebook was never a good "digital town square". Groups can become fractured, sometimes ideologically, splitting the community into factions. Groups, I think, are now the driving factor on Facebook, overtaking the personal network.

Years ago, I came across this project, small tech. Their goals are to build a small web tool set. It looks like they're still building, which is cool, but it doesn't really have a lot of traction, I think. They have an update from last year, which is nice to see. The three core projects are:

Kitten is a development tool kit
Domain is a turn key hosting platform
Place is your individual presence on the internet (photos, posts, comments, etc.)

There are interesting ideas here. Like Facebook, it starts with the self, it could be used to build that personal network, while being in full control of your content. Obviously, the barrier to entry here is hosting the services yourself. Domain has an interesting feature where tokens can be generated which, when given to someone, and used, it authorizes them to have a space on the domain. They did a pilot, I believe, where a municipality in Belgium used the token system to generate a space for each citizen in the municipality to get a small webspace hosted by the city. The tokens were mailed out to the citizens, along with instructions on how to use them.

We recently have been engaging with Facebook Marketplace to get rid of some stuff. We usually just put things on the Buy Nothing page, but some of the stuff we're getting rid of is big, expensive, justifies asking for a payment. It feels bad using Facebook, but that's where the people are. The buy nothing group has been very rewarding. The amount of good condition baby stuff we've given away to new and struggling mothers, feels good, and saves them from having to acquire so much stuff.

This all leads me to an analogy I've had lingering in my head for a long time. The internet is a common, and just like the commons of the past, it too was appropriated by merchants and privatized. Except, it was never truly held in common, it was privatized before mass utilization. So my over arching question is this: How do we build a local, digital, common?

Of all the tools and ideas that exist within this federated space, how could we combine them together in a way that can be implemented to build community locally? That allows for that local exchange like the Buy Nothing pages or Facebook Marketplace, that allows for local event organizing, and allows you to connect with local people.

7 comments

Leading people away from what they’re familiar with though is probably the biggest challenge. “Why would I use that? You want me to stop using this platform that hundreds of millions of people use? Are you kidding? And you want me to restructure it for my own town?”
I don’t even what to think about how many fewer people use alternatives over the big tech behemoths that are making our lives hell. Sartre sure was right, hell is other people
Idk I have a lot of thoughts and no hope. The atomization is reaching a zombifying state
- On the positive side, it feels like these big tech platforms are enshittifying themselves faster and faster these days. Of course, all the people just end up going to a different corporate platform (like bluesky or threads).
- I know the Neighborhood app sends a mailer out to get you to enroll in their service. I wonder how effective that would be for a local platform.
  If I could make a Lemmy instance that generates keys I could use in a small mailing campaign, which are used to create accounts, that would be interesting. I wonder how many people it would realistically get.

More broadly, as well, I've had this other lingering thought about a kind of "working class network". Even something as simple as a web ring type arrangement of sites and services for working class people, by working class people.
The primary connections that exist between Hexbear, Lemmy ML, and Lemmygrad I think are representative of this kind of network already, if only informally. Im not sure how you would formalize and maintain such an idea, but growing this network beyond just us here could provide much needed communal space more broadly. This is a nebulous, amorphous thought.
For all of this and above there needs to be a clear message about why any of it exists.
- You might appreciate this blog, about various ideas and projects by an ex employee of Discourse: https://blog.muni.town/
  
  Going to give this a look soon, thanks!

I think the issue is less that we're engaging with people physically far away from us, and rather that we're engaging with so many people. It's fine if a friend group only talks online and they're thousands of miles apart, because they can still feel really close to each other through their regular interactions. When you're in a discord server and look who liked your message and see it's your friend, that feels meaningful.
In contrast, all these large social media platforms have algorithmic feeds showing popular posts, with comments from users you'll likely never interact with again, who are all posting for reasons like fame and influence and money, and it gets very impersonal and alienating. It's clear we're comodifying our attention, and the interactions feel less like genuine connections with other living people.
So I think the solution is "democratizing influence". Designing a system where specific creators and specific posts don't spread that far, while still letting culture and ideas and political movements spread. I discussed a radical social media design based around digital gardens that would try to democratize influence in this way, but there are likely other approaches more similar to what we have now as well. The main idea is to interact with fewer people more often, and you find new people through your existing friends.
All that said, I think our local physical community is really important and one of the biggest victims of neoliberalism and individualism. I'd love a social media that's actually just for a specific physical locality, with posting, mutual aid, community event planning, organization of CPRs, etc.