From the essay: I read this in parallel today with The Fungibility of Doctors by Brian Vartebedian, and these essays have captured a story about the systematic depreciation of organic human...
From the essay:
There's a default assumption baked into how Silicon Valley builds products, and it tracks against how urban planners redesign neighbourhoods: that communities are interchangeable, and if you "lose" one, you can manufacture a replacement; that the value of a group of people who share space and history can be captured in a metric and deployed at scale.
Economists have a word for assets that can be swapped one-for-one without loss of value: fungible. A dollar is fungible. A barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude is fungible.
...A mass of people bound together by years of shared context, inside jokes and collective memory is not.
And yet we keep treating communities as though they are.
I read this in parallel today with The Fungibility of Doctors by Brian Vartebedian, and these essays have captured a story about the systematic depreciation of organic human relationships.
The values and priorities of builders of "social" platforms and institutions - be they urbanists, market owners, health systems or community hosts, represent a small subset of what the general public desires and cares for.
I've never been able to recapture the connections of the G+ community whose dissolution brought me to Tildes. Tumblr just encourages me to scroll through mild entertainment without engaging the people behind it. The less we speak of short-form Twitter, Bluesky, and Threads, the better. Mastodon hasn't encouraged persistent community formation, from what I've encountered. Nextdoor, which ostensibly encourages communication in physical communities, feeds crime anxiety, ragebait, and advertising. We all know how extractive and damaging Meta's "community" products are, and the narrowness and wild variability of Reddit "communities".
I cherish what Deimos and the rest of us have created on Tildes, but if this platform disappeared tomorrow, what would we have in its stead?
Whenever I changed jobs, there were some people I kept in touch with and others I didn’t. After leaving high school, I lost touch with most people. Many of us reconnected after Facebook became a...
Whenever I changed jobs, there were some people I kept in touch with and others I didn’t. After leaving high school, I lost touch with most people. Many of us reconnected after Facebook became a thing, but much like with a high school reunion, when you meet again you don’t necessarily choose to hang out much. Similarly after moving, you don’t always remain in touch with your neighbors.
What I’m getting at is that maybe a lot of communities aren’t meant to last forever. It’s okay to have transient communities, like the people you meet in college. Online communities are nice because they let us hang out for years with people we know slightly, but often these relationships aren’t that strong and we don’t really make an effort to maintain them. Maybe that’s okay?
If you don’t know someone well enough to exchange email addresses and phone numbers, how strong a relationship is that really?
Facebook lets you keep in touch with people just out of inertia, for years or decades. It seems like a good thing, better than what we had before in the sense that I at least I have some contact with people I might have entirely lost touch with otherwise.
If you quit Facebook over politics, you lose something, but many people don’t seem to mind it that much? Presumably they find other ways to keep in touch or do without.
The longest-lasting community that I’ve been a part of is The Well. I still have an account there and show up once a year. I’m younger than the original crowd and a lot of people I knew slightly have died.
There is little reason for young people to care about The Well. They’re doing other things in their own communities.
The value of online communities isn't just the depth of relationships, but exposure to ideas and membership in communities that you're unlikely to encounter in daily life. I, /u/chocobean, and...
The value of online communities isn't just the depth of relationships, but exposure to ideas and membership in communities that you're unlikely to encounter in daily life.
I, /u/chocobean, and others here are physically isolated in small towns where we can't access in-person conversations that cover the breadth of our interests. LGBTQ+, neurodivergent, disabled, and other minority people can be equally isolated or silenced, and unable to join deep enough communities offline to provide adequate support.
There are all kinds of reasons why communities form. Not just for friendship, but for professional development/networking/institution-building; local policy formulation, culture consolidation, business development, and trading; promulgation and reinforcement of identities; sharing craft knowledge; mutual support...
Real power exists when you can dictate the terms of community formation, monetization, and destruction. Yes, you're free to walk away from Facebook, or decide that The Well is too old-fashioned as a matter of taste. But that's a matter of your choice, and not potentially totalitarian control of what community members are able to participate in.
Whoever runs an online community provides governance and infrastructure. This is still true for small communities like Tildes or a Mastodon server. There are plenty of disputes between people who...
Whoever runs an online community provides governance and infrastructure. This is still true for small communities like Tildes or a Mastodon server. There are plenty of disputes between people who run servers in the Fediverse. I think having decent moderation sometimes requires making decisions that might seem pretty questionable from the outside, and transparency is not feasible because it would turn into something like a public trial of whether someone ought to be banned, which is not fun and will turn people off.
The Bluesky folks have a goal of making themselves inessential but it’s work in progress. It requires other people to do a lot of work, and they can’t do it themselves, because the whole point is that someone else should be doing it and have the power that comes from that. There are promising signs, though, so maybe this year we will see it happen?
Another trend is towards encrypted group chat, which can be seen as a way for a service provider to get out of the moderation business, at least to some extent. These communities will have their own governance issues, though. There will also be communities run by people you hate and they will be unaccountable to anyone.
To me, nothing has felt like forums. I feel the fact they gave so much emphasis to who was the commenter - not just name but avatars, stats and all, made it feel more of a community with actual...
To me, nothing has felt like forums. I feel the fact they gave so much emphasis to who was the commenter - not just name but avatars, stats and all, made it feel more of a community with actual people behind it.
Reddit and tildes feel way more 'anonymous' and content focused. Not necessarily a bad thing, but different.
The same holds true for teams. I've had the joy in if working on two high functioning teams in my 25 year career. When the team clicks, it can fly, faster than the sum of its members. The work...
The same holds true for teams. I've had the joy in if working on two high functioning teams in my 25 year career. When the team clicks, it can fly, faster than the sum of its members. The work gets done fast, arguments are convivial, everyone gets along and enjoys themselves. Twice I've had that experience and in both cases they teams were broken up for "reasons" then everyone was gone within a year. It was such a wasted opportunity.
I've had that experience - it's like a perfect ensemble cast in TV or theatre. Once things get rolling, everyone understands what they can contribute and has a great time. They prop up each...
I've had that experience - it's like a perfect ensemble cast in TV or theatre. Once things get rolling, everyone understands what they can contribute and has a great time. They prop up each other's weaknesses and showcase one another's strengths. And then everyone gets reassigned in the hope they can spread the magic, or to let the star performers shine alone, or something like that, and it never quite reproduces because a team needs the right people and takes time to gel into a community.
From the essay:
I read this in parallel today with The Fungibility of Doctors by Brian Vartebedian, and these essays have captured a story about the systematic depreciation of organic human relationships.
The values and priorities of builders of "social" platforms and institutions - be they urbanists, market owners, health systems or community hosts, represent a small subset of what the general public desires and cares for.
I've never been able to recapture the connections of the G+ community whose dissolution brought me to Tildes. Tumblr just encourages me to scroll through mild entertainment without engaging the people behind it. The less we speak of short-form Twitter, Bluesky, and Threads, the better. Mastodon hasn't encouraged persistent community formation, from what I've encountered. Nextdoor, which ostensibly encourages communication in physical communities, feeds crime anxiety, ragebait, and advertising. We all know how extractive and damaging Meta's "community" products are, and the narrowness and wild variability of Reddit "communities".
I cherish what Deimos and the rest of us have created on Tildes, but if this platform disappeared tomorrow, what would we have in its stead?
Whenever I changed jobs, there were some people I kept in touch with and others I didn’t. After leaving high school, I lost touch with most people. Many of us reconnected after Facebook became a thing, but much like with a high school reunion, when you meet again you don’t necessarily choose to hang out much. Similarly after moving, you don’t always remain in touch with your neighbors.
What I’m getting at is that maybe a lot of communities aren’t meant to last forever. It’s okay to have transient communities, like the people you meet in college. Online communities are nice because they let us hang out for years with people we know slightly, but often these relationships aren’t that strong and we don’t really make an effort to maintain them. Maybe that’s okay?
If you don’t know someone well enough to exchange email addresses and phone numbers, how strong a relationship is that really?
Facebook lets you keep in touch with people just out of inertia, for years or decades. It seems like a good thing, better than what we had before in the sense that I at least I have some contact with people I might have entirely lost touch with otherwise.
If you quit Facebook over politics, you lose something, but many people don’t seem to mind it that much? Presumably they find other ways to keep in touch or do without.
The longest-lasting community that I’ve been a part of is The Well. I still have an account there and show up once a year. I’m younger than the original crowd and a lot of people I knew slightly have died.
There is little reason for young people to care about The Well. They’re doing other things in their own communities.
The value of online communities isn't just the depth of relationships, but exposure to ideas and membership in communities that you're unlikely to encounter in daily life.
I, /u/chocobean, and others here are physically isolated in small towns where we can't access in-person conversations that cover the breadth of our interests. LGBTQ+, neurodivergent, disabled, and other minority people can be equally isolated or silenced, and unable to join deep enough communities offline to provide adequate support.
There are all kinds of reasons why communities form. Not just for friendship, but for professional development/networking/institution-building; local policy formulation, culture consolidation, business development, and trading; promulgation and reinforcement of identities; sharing craft knowledge; mutual support...
Real power exists when you can dictate the terms of community formation, monetization, and destruction. Yes, you're free to walk away from Facebook, or decide that The Well is too old-fashioned as a matter of taste. But that's a matter of your choice, and not potentially totalitarian control of what community members are able to participate in.
Whoever runs an online community provides governance and infrastructure. This is still true for small communities like Tildes or a Mastodon server. There are plenty of disputes between people who run servers in the Fediverse. I think having decent moderation sometimes requires making decisions that might seem pretty questionable from the outside, and transparency is not feasible because it would turn into something like a public trial of whether someone ought to be banned, which is not fun and will turn people off.
The Bluesky folks have a goal of making themselves inessential but it’s work in progress. It requires other people to do a lot of work, and they can’t do it themselves, because the whole point is that someone else should be doing it and have the power that comes from that. There are promising signs, though, so maybe this year we will see it happen?
Another trend is towards encrypted group chat, which can be seen as a way for a service provider to get out of the moderation business, at least to some extent. These communities will have their own governance issues, though. There will also be communities run by people you hate and they will be unaccountable to anyone.
To me, nothing has felt like forums. I feel the fact they gave so much emphasis to who was the commenter - not just name but avatars, stats and all, made it feel more of a community with actual people behind it.
Reddit and tildes feel way more 'anonymous' and content focused. Not necessarily a bad thing, but different.
The same holds true for teams. I've had the joy in if working on two high functioning teams in my 25 year career. When the team clicks, it can fly, faster than the sum of its members. The work gets done fast, arguments are convivial, everyone gets along and enjoys themselves. Twice I've had that experience and in both cases they teams were broken up for "reasons" then everyone was gone within a year. It was such a wasted opportunity.
I've had that experience - it's like a perfect ensemble cast in TV or theatre. Once things get rolling, everyone understands what they can contribute and has a great time. They prop up each other's weaknesses and showcase one another's strengths. And then everyone gets reassigned in the hope they can spread the magic, or to let the star performers shine alone, or something like that, and it never quite reproduces because a team needs the right people and takes time to gel into a community.