#Community #Tech #CommuntyTech #TheSocialInterNetwork #ArtelHost #TePeWu #FLOSS
@Strypey
@Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

While I am still desperately fighting for some headspace to write a full size article (not easy), let me outline a quintessence of my perspective on the optimal community-wise use of fediverse environment.

So, the central term is "community". Here you can see (as a terminological convention) what I consider a community: a group of people, sharing several tangible and intangible commons:
- space (physical or virtual),
- means of communication and transport,
- resources,
- worldview (how the world works),
- goals (what is its desired shape),
- roadmap (how to get there),
- protocols (how to interact internally and externally),
- and, finally, identity (yes, we are the community).

Assumptions concerning community:
1. Each person needs to participate in at least one community to be stable and realized.
2. A person can participate in more than one community at the time
3. Conflicts between communities one participates in can happen, but often they can be resolved.

To thrive safely, community needs to have full control over three "services" provided by the (online) environment:
a. Communal memory retention.
b. Internal and external communication channels.
c. Clear division between the internal and the external.

The online environment (infrastructure), aka internet, was created to provide survivors of thermonuclear war with communication, command and control previously reserved for upper echelons of power. Due to existence of various networking standards, it was to facilitate communication between heterogeneous networks/communities, while respecting their differences and keeping their local resources, well, local.
Fast forward 30 years, no thermonuclear war occurred. Heterogeneousness gradually vanished, replaced by "TCP/IP to the curb" and then "...to the pocket". And many technical, metatechnical (think: topology) and sociopolitical tools have been employed to steamroll "command and control to the people" notion. Effectively, neoliberal institutions and thinking tainted once proudly anarchist "cyberspace" and made it a hyperefficient extension of the capitalist "meatspace" instead.
Most communities now only have contractual control over their data and communication, which is increasingly precarious, as the physical infrastructure crumbles and political changes make all guarantees flimsier every month.

Enter fediverse. A distributed network of instances built upon the shared protocol (ActivityPub, mostly). Each instance can be anything it wants to be, as long as it communicates properly. Each (by default) can provide whatever community needs to thrive (see above).

Just like the internet of old. Considering the evolution of underlying infrastructure, nodes of the network no longer have to be expensive or hardware-heavy. WiFi, LoRaWAN, mesh networks, VPNs, self-hosting solutions like Yunohost or Caprover, OpenWRT routers and Linux servers on laptops or SBCs - it all makes it relatively simple to get the command and control back to communities.

Now, as we are given technical tools to regain our data sovereignty, we (rhetorical "we") realize how much our mentality changed. Two main hurdles seem to be alienation (misnamed as "individualism" or "independence") and opportunism (sold as "convenience" or "efficiency").

People got alienated, so they do not consider themselves as community participants. It makes them assume a "customer" stance, instead of being a co-creator. As they try to fen for themselves, they also loose most skills, in favour of making money. The cult of specialisation makes them buy, instead of make - and claim it to be the virtue.

A very old wisdom is embedded in a seemingly silly joke. "How many psychotherapists are needed to change a bulb? - Just one, but the bulb needs to wish to change itself!" <faint applause>
No person [thinks they] need a community, until their alienation sweeps the floor with them. No community will migrate out from the corpoverse, until they feel to the bone the chill of existential threat of staying there. There are already such communities (LGBTQA+, anarchist, climate activist ones - to name a few), and political changes (trumpizm and the worldwide brown wave rising) will keep the numbers growing.

So, how can we help those interested to move into the wild and not perish? We need an infrastructure first (yes, I am an infrastructure freak, and proud of it). I think of a network of cooperative enterprises, providing support and knowledge, creating incubators and developing less decentralizable services of the 2nd tier.
An interested community starts with a managed hosting, exploring platfoms (applications) of their choice. Once they decide what is good for them, the may move to a VPS and start buiding their fediverse presence. As they grow confident, they may decide to migrate (with our assistance) to self-hosting (using a laptop or mini PC), and later towards creating their own acces VPN and joining secure backbone, connecting other nodes spawned the same way.

As we see, using fediverse to create safe network of communities is almost trivial. The real challenge is - as usually - to educate, agitate and organize. Can we do it?