AKASHA Conversations #3 — An idea called fractal localism

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Our monthly AKASHA Conversations explore critical facets of decentralized social networking, with a focus this quarter at least on all things moderating. We welcomed Murat Ayfer as our expert speaker last month.

Murat is our kind of guy. Having experienced the lows, highs, and more lows of moderating a 60k+ member community, he has been thinking of ways to make moderating more scalable, so that decentralized social networking is more scalable. But more than thinking — he has been coding too, as you can see at https://beta.spiel.com/ .

Scalability refers to the ease with which a system can adjust its size, its capacity, as needed. There’s no doubting that computing resource is now fully scalable, almost trivially so, but humans don’t work the same as machines. I make this point quite often. In digital identity for example, machine identity is quite different from the digital mediation and augmentation of human identity in digitalised social networks. In our context here, centralized social networking scales people in ways that are proving, increasingly, to lead to very poor outcomes. Decentralized social networking very likely needs to learn more from the social sciences than, say, Facebook.

Scaling on Philip Sheldrake

AKASHA Conversations #3 — An idea called fractal localism