software for communities

There's a fantasy popular among technologists and policymakers that community can be engineered. That if you identify the right variables and apply the right interventions, you can produce community on demand. This fantasy has a name in the urbanist literature: it's called "new town syndrome," after the observation that Britain's postwar new towns,... See more

In every case, the platform's architects // successors assumed that the product was the platform and the community was an emergent feature that would re-emerge given similar conditions. They had the relationship exactly backwards. The community was the product and the platform was the container, and when the container breaks, the product spills and... See more

Federation is a misfeature for hosted platforms

When it comes to decentralization, federation is a huge buzzword and selling point. It seems like in theory a good middle ground of peer-to-peer and entirely centralized. However, I think in the case of a chat platform, which hosts a community, it causes more problems than it solves. For things like... See more

I’m sympathetic at a cellular level to the complaints of the communities who want and need safer places to be together. I’m also still stuck believing that big-world global platforms are never going to provide those kinds of places. And also that we need the big-world layers to connect safer places together.

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay—a malleable material that users could reshape at will. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. When your tools don’t work the way you need them to, you submit feedback and hope for the best. You’re forced to adapt your workflow to fit your software, when it... See more