During the development of our second prototype “Shepherd”, we realised that permissions for truly distributed social media are a thorny thing. Within the decentralised design of Solid, we have to define how spaces are controlled in interactions between users. We also have to be mindful of preserving the context of the interaction, while also respecting the privacy of individuals who might belong to different networks, technical or otherwise.
As you may know, I am involved in https://darcy.is, an attempt to build a better social network atop of Solid. The developers are chugging along at a slow but steady pace, expect a new version to come out soon.
Solid itself is a really intriguing and awesome idea: Everything you want to share or publish, regardless of public or for a limited audience gets stored on your Solid Pod, completely uncoupling data from application and publisher.
So your theoretical Facebook posts and likes and comments would not be stored and owned by Facebook. They would just handle the presentation and feed and recommendations and so on. And if you want to change the network, you get to keep all your content and contacts.
Now, the way Solid is designed has one big constraint: You cannot change the URL that points at your pod, ever. If you do, all the links between your content and that of others would get lost otherwise. So, if a pod provider would got belly up, that would be a bad thing.
One of the earliest pod providers is solid.community. Or rather. Was. The service is shut down. Which is fine, it was advertised as experimental anyway, it was free and purposely only had a very small storage space. It was meant for those earliest of adopters and for developers to see how all this works.
Alas, someone thought it would be helpful to keep it alive and managed to migrate everything to solidcommunity.net.
Which is also fine and helpful, except two things:
Seriously, my Fellow Nerds, especially if you work on something that promises privacy: These things matter! No one will adopt your project, if you fuck this up, and here, you fucked up quite a bit.
Before you rant at me: Yes, I am quite aware that what I was using was basically a test system. And I bet that 99,9% of all other users of that system knew this too and acted accordingly. I highly doubt that any actual private data was compromised. And I don’t think there is any foul play involved. People did what they thought would be best. But, well, guess what: They thought wrong!
Ausgelöst von einem seit längerer Zeit latent schwelendem Konflikt in der deutschsprachigen Online-Rollenspielszene kamen mir neulich einige Gedanken zu der Frage, was denn eigentlich eine „Online Community“ ausmacht, wo sich solche einfinden, und was unterschiedliche Erwartungshaltungen da anrichten können.
Halten wir einmal ein paar Begriffe und Überlegungen fest:
Foren sind damit eine spannende Sonderkonstruktion: Man kann nicht aktiv der Plattform beitreten ohne nicht gleichzeitig auch Mitglied der dortigen Community zu werden. Dadurch, wie Foren die Übersicht über neue Beiträge präsentieren, wird es zum Beispiel in der Regel bewusst einfach gemacht, immer alle Bereiche des Forums wahrzunehmen.
Die Funktion „Zeige Ungelesenes“, die immer die neuen Beiträge zu einem Thema in den Vordergrund rückt, sorgt dabei dafür, dass Aufmerksamkeit auf viel diskutierte Dinge gelenkt wird. Als Thema X vor zwei Wochen aufkam, habe ich mich vielleicht nicht dafür interessiert und es einfach weggeklickt. Wenn die Foren Software mir aber das Thema jeden Tag mehrmal wieder präsentiert und mir damit mitteilt, dass viele andere das Thema behandeln, dann werde ich doch mal neugierig.
Das bedeutet aber auch, dass es schwierig wird, Bereiche oder Menschen bewusst auszublenden. Ein Forum „zwingt“ alle Teilnehmenden in eine „Gemeinschaft“.
Eine Plattform wie z.B. Facebook funktioniert da anders: Von vornherein wird hier akzeptiert, dass nicht alle mit allen kommunizieren wollen, und diese Filter sind häufig auch auf Gruppenebene noch funktional — man kann sich leichter abkapseln und andere ausblenden. Alternativ eben auch eigene Gruppen bilden. (Das ist dann auch das Problem: Facebook-Gruppen ab einer bestimmten Größe funktionieren häufig nicht mehr als Gemeinschaft, sondern nur noch als Ankündigungsmethode.)
Problematisch wird das ganze dann, wenn Menschen ein Forum wie eine Plattform benutzen wollen. „Lass mich doch mein Ding machen und ignorier mich“ ist ein Nutzungskonzept, dass von Menschen in einem typischen Internetforum sehr viel Selbstdisziplin und mentalen Aufwand erfordert — viel mehr als auf z.B. Facebook.
Lässt sich das auflösen?
Mein Instinkt ist, dass das nicht ohne grundlegende Änderung der dahinterstehenden Technik, bzw. der Benutzerführung geht. So oder so hilft es, wenn Menschen sich online tatsächlich bewusster damit beschäftigen und einigen, wie sie sich sehen: Als Gemeinschaft, lose Gruppe, Gruppe von Gemeinschaften oder etwas ganz anderes.
While going through the Spreadsheet I created as a tool after writing the last blogpost here, I realized that what was completely obvious to me, isn’t necessarily to others. Mostly because the whole argument about the details was mostly in my head.
So, let’s write it down:
To start, and to have a common vocabulary, we should set down a few basic communication model parameters:
| Realtime is the discussion we have at the breakfast table, or when we trashtalk our opponents inside a videogame, in a meeting, over the phone or even text or video chats. The key element is that it happens in real time, attendance is perceived and people generally consider it rude if you make them wait for an answer too long. | Asynchronous communication is much more robust in regard to time constraints. In olden times, we simply knew that the messenger pigeon will take a while to deliver that missive to the King, so we waited. Letters took their time, and it was acknowledged that the recipient will then need time and effort to compose a proper answer. |
| One to One is a discussion with just two participants. That can be realtime (a phone call) or asynchronous (a letter). | One to Many used to be the prerogative of official proclamations, public speeches and, later, newspapers and radio or tv broadcasts. |
| Many to Many is something that we have quite a lot today on the Internet. A group of people communicating within itself, or with another group of people. Sometimes in there, you have a few separate one-to-one conversations. Sometimes everyone is listening to just one person, sometimes everyone is broadcasting at once while no one listens. | |
| Closed communications strive to be private — no one outside the elected circle may listen in — or they may listen in, but they are not allowed to participate. | Open on the other hand is there for all to see, hear and join. |
And on top of those models, we have the selectors by which people decide which communications they want to see or even participate in:
Serendipitous discovery of new topics, persons and discussions is something that is, in my mind, incredibly important these days. We need to be exposed to ideas and persons we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. We often don’t know that we were missing an idea or something before we actually found it. I cannot search for unknown unknowns.
What I can look for are topics: Show me articles about that car I plan to buy. Or I’m looking for a place to discuss my new favorite game. Systems that make it easy for me to find those topics are helpful — but they tend to keep me in that bubble, I don’t often learn about things outside that topic.
Human Curators of content are incredibly important. Malcolm Gladwell calls them "Mavens" — a group of people that hunt out information about things and then strive to educate people about those. These curators are often very similar to a discovery by topic, because they usually have a theme, a thing that they are mostly interested in. But not exclusively so. Everyone has side hobbies, interests that are not obvious, and these make their way into the communication stream of a curator too.
Finally, we need to look at the different bits of communication and who owns them: This is less interesting in a face to face conversation in a room, without any technical tools, but gets really important very fast if you do things over the Internet.
Take this blog article here. It is written by me, posted on my Blog. I wholly own and control it — I can delete it if I want to, I can edit and revise it.
I also control the comments that are submitted on this Blog. If you have something to say about this and want to correct me, you can submit a comment here, that everyone will then be able to read.
But I will still own the comment in some sense — I will be able to hide it, delete it, even completely ban you from ever commenting again. Heck, WordPress even allows me to edit the comment, putting words into your mouths that you have never intended to write!
(I could have a variety of reasons to do so: I found what was written offensive. Or deemed it to be just not helpful for the discussion I wanted to have. Or I just don’t like the commentator. Some of these reasons can be completely legitimate, some are somewhat to very hostile)
If you want to assure ownership of your writing, you will have to do so on your own Blogpage. You could write an article of your own, pointing at mine and say whatever you want to say and I could not immediately delete it.
Different communication systems handle this ownership differently — Twitter, Mastodon and similar systems don’t know any post-comment separation. Everything is a post, and every post fully belongs to the person who made it. That has upsides (as no one can maliciously remove your contribution) but also downsides (no one can easily take stewardship of a discussion, not even with the noblest of intents)
Lastly, there are some concerns about safety: Sadly, there will always be people who use communication systems to harass others. They could use technology to stalk people, flood their screens with hateful messages or simply spread rumors and lies about them. A good system will need a few tools to address that:
Not all of these tools should be in everyone’s hands (I should be able to decide that someone cannot see my things anymore, but a complete ban needs a higher and accountable authority), and not all of these need to be applied for a lifetime — sometimes it is sufficient to mute someone on just this one conversation, or for just a month. Sometimes people learn after a ban and come back as a better person.
So, having set down some definitions and ideas, how does all that relate to what I expect from a system that allows me to interact with others on a daily basis?