[dbingham]

> We can incorporate, but can we indemocrate?

I'm working on this right now. I'm building a Facebook alternative that will be a nonprofit, multistakeholder cooperative if I can get it off the ground. It won't be owned by anyone, instead it will be governed by its workers and users in collaboration.

It's called Communities (https://communities.social) and it's in open beta now. We got the apps in the app stores last month.

[miki123211]

How do you ensure "one user, one vote?"

This seems impossible without intrusive government ID verification, and not immune to government meddling in any case.

[dbingham]

To be determined. It's not a problem we have yet, since we're going to ease into the cooperative governance.

Right now it's an LLC. If we can hit basic financial stability, then we'll convert the LLC to a nonprofit and start with an appointed board with a two year term who's job is to draft the permanent bylaws and define the electoral system. Basically, I'm bootstrapping it and we need to raise the money to pay the legal fees and fund the legal research needed to get the cooperative structure right. And part of that is going to be designing the electoral systems.

It's definitely going to be hard and it may end up coming down to "ID verification required to vote". Not to use the platform, just to vote in board elections. I'd love to find a way to avoid that, but we can always do it if we have to.

The plan is to moderate the platform pretty heavily using a two layered moderation system: community moderation as the first layer and official moderation as a second layer that moderates the community moderation. That moderation will be very much aimed at keeping the platform as free of bots, spammers, and propagandists as possible.

So if we're successful in that, we may be able to avoid the intrusive verification by saying "It's an honor system and all active users in good standing are trusted to be honorable." But it remains to be seen whether we're successful enough in the moderation to even attempt that.

Or we may be able to come up with some other system to ensure it.

The other piece is that it's a multi-stakeholder cooperative. Users elect half the board, but the workers elect the other half. And with workers, it will be easy to restrict it to one worker one vote. So the workers can and will provide a safety backstop against user elections that go off the rails in one way or another.

[eucyclos]

Do you have a plan for dealing with the clickbait problem?

[dbingham]

I'm exploring various systems of community moderation.

Right now experimenting with a "demote" button that people are encouraged to use on: disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, spam, and slop.

Communities' default feed is just chronological, but it also has "Most Active" and "Most Recent Activity". Right now, Demote knocks things down the "Most Active" feed.

Eventually, a high enough percentage of demotes would result in posts being removed from public feeds. A second, higher threshold, would result in it being removed from all feeds.

Demote usage would be moderated, and removal thresholds could be appealed to the official moderation team. Users who abuse or misuse demote would lose the privilege.

It's an experiment and we'll see if it works. It's also really early. But the thing that Communities is doing differently is that the users will ultimately be in control through democratic elections of the board. And I expect moderation to be a frequent and recurring issue in elections. (You know, if the whole thing gets off the ground at all.)

[talkingtab]

When driving a car, I often wish I could tag other cars with arrows that mark them as bad drivers. These are the ones who weave in and out over 4 lanes on an interstate highway. When enough tags get the car, they have to pull over and take a break or something.

One immediate problem is malicious or over zealous taggers. But it seems easy to build a system that if you are too enthusiastic, then you have to pull over and take a break.

But accumulated reputation seems a thing. And if it is universal read and write it seems beneficial. It is somewhat like reputation in real life.

This depends somewhat on identities with some degree of stickiness. If you can just change who you are then bad reputation is not a big deal. But if there is some cost to establishing and maintaining an identity ...

[eucyclos]

interesting. I have the theory that most networks, and most social networks, are doomed to tolerate too much or too little deviance - sailing between 4chan Scylla or reddit Charybdis. I hope you manage to thread the needle!