Anti-social media

This makes me think about structures that are even more fundamental to the Internet:

• The Domain Name System is inherently hierarchical, and the highest levels are usually controlled by corporations that are much more powerful than I am.
• The process to register a domain name (like piefed.social) requires having a lot of cashflow (it seems that you need to pay many thousands of dollars each year): https://hostadvice.com/blog/domains/how-become-domain-registrar/
• The process to make registrations available with a new top-level domain (like .social or .name) requires having a lot of capital (it seems that you need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars): https://dev.to/kailyons/tutorial-make-your-own-top-level-domain-name-like-com-org-and-net-jhd

Fundamentally, my ability to send a message between China and Argentina or Fiji and Kyrgyzstan is mediated by a relatively small number of people. For example, the ICANN "key ceremony" is probably not easy for me to participate in: https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/the-key-to-the-internet-and-key-ceremonies-an-explainer-11-07-2023-en

I think it'd be hard to maintain connections to people that are far away from me (I don't know people in very many cities, and I certainly don't know enough people or have enough money to lay my own cables or launch my own satellites or set up my own radio towers to enable me to be independent of ICANN). Similarly, I'm not about to set up my own postal service or courier system.

I am very excited about the possibility of democratically-run communities and instances. We are still building more basic things than that but it is something I think about a lot and hope to run some experiments with this in the future.

From the perspective of most social-media users, content moderation is a matter of imposition, whether by remote company owners or by the more proximate volunteer administrators. The design pattern of implicit feudalism relies on power-holders who are not chosen or removable by those they govern. Rule enforcement occurs through censorship of user content or the removal of users altogether, but rules do not necessarily apply to the administrators themselves. Users can speak out or leave online spaces, but they lack the direct levers of effective voice. This contributes to the “techlash” against platform companies that spreads with every scandal of content moderation and abuse; by hoarding power, the companies have hoarded the blame.