If the goal is solidarity and community, creating a world where little feudal lords reign over independent territories and negotiate the terms of the interchange of ideas can hardly be the best answer. I very much understand that in times of rising authoritarianism such an escape into decentralised resistance is alluring to progressive political movements. But this is a temporary fix at best. It is not a progressive vision for what comes after. Decentralisation without social institutions that debate, define and – when necessary – enforce fairness and equality is a euphemism for survival of the fittest.
Imagine Mastodon had a governance system where all users, admins and minorities were equally represented. Imagine this system intervened in the practices of some admins. Right now I can only imagine the Mastodon community to react with an outcry about such an audacious attack on their free and decentralised kingdom. This reaction would be completely in line with libertarian impulses that are so very present in all things digital. Cyberlibertarians routinely invoke the “free internet” as a vague supreme ideal that has to be defended against any kind of collective, democratic governance. Their ideology is based on private control and decentralised market-based exchange. It has no use for community, solidarity and participation. It is founded on contempt for democratic intervention, a belief in the unique nature of the digital realm and the superiority of those controlling it. These ideas are very present in the Mastodon community as well. Most often this is not the result of an active ideological commitment to libertarian or right-wing views. It is, however, very open to being instrumentalised by these ideologies and it is reinforcing them – willingly or not.
This is basically an article arguing for a fedi equivalent of the UN.
This is something that has been on my mind as well - centralized platforms such as Reddit et al. are functionally monarchies, but the Fediverse is functionally feudal… which, y’know, isn’t great… the thing is, I’m not sure how we can solve this problem, and I’ve thought about it quite a bit over the years.
The root of the issue is that there is no way to preserve privacy and also ensure that every user is a real human and not a bot/sockpuppet or whatever, so any forms of democracy are dead on arrival on the Internet. The only thing I can really think of would be a real-world fully mutual co-operative that requires in-person voting to decide on issues, but obviously that would mean that instances would need to be tied to a real-world location. I suppose live video calls might be possible, but idk… with modern AI deepfakes, even that might be prone to manipulation by malicious actors.
Until we’ve got a solution to that problem, I think federated feudal states is about the best we can do, and it’s a vast improvement over the monarchic alternative.
@bearboiblake @rimu
One important difference to feudalism is that you can really easily move your homestead to another lord’s domain.
I’d say that does solve a lot. Making instance-switching more fluent, and then yet more fluent, would be enough in my eyes.
Peasants could move between fiefs, but fiefs couldn’t easily move, except by gathering everyone up, and packing everything they can into a caravan, and taking a perilous journey to new lands. Users are peasants, communities are fiefs.