Writing about open & equitable product development

Assembling Community OS

I've previously written about the multi-app platform of my dreams as a community professional: The Community OS stack.

While undeniably ambitious, it's a vision firmly grounded in practicality. Thanks to the compounding value of open source and standard web protocols, the path to digital discourse nirvana can be mapped out with a fair amount of detail.

The notion of a 'Community OS' grew out of an expanded vision of Commune-chat. The use of the term “operating system” for what I'm describing will undoubtedly be contested, but if we can define operating systems for computer hardware, I truly don't see why we shouldn't also have equivalent operating systems for digital communications.

I will even go so far as to argue that part of the reason why our comms tooling has failed us so drastically in the 21st century is because we never looked at digital communications through the holistic lens of a modular yet interoperable whole.

Instead of hardware as the common denominator, the conceptual Community OS is standardized by modern-day web protocols:

Identity – Conduit of flows

Your identity (ID) inhabits the places and behaviors which the Bonfire, Stream and Garden (see below) symbolize, simultaneously experiencing and expressing itself through those outlets.

Examples: Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Email, Phone numbers

Bonfires – Discursive, omnidirectional flow

Examples: Chat (Discord, Slack), forum (Discourse, StackOverFlow, Reddit), Mailing lists.

Streams – Declarative, linear flow

Microblogging (Twitter, Tumblr, Mastodon), Television (TikTok, YouTube), Everything-app (Facebook, WeChat).

Gardens – Contemplative, bottom-up flow

Wikis (Wikipedia, Fandom), Networked notes (Notion, Roam), Blogs (WordPress, Medium, Substack)

Overlapping boundaries

There are no strict boundaries in the Stream/Garden/Bonfire trio. A blog for instance can behave like a bonfire when it is more discursive through its comment sections, it can be consumed in stream-form via an RSS reader, and it takes the shape of a garden when it's deeply interlinked and less concerned with chronology.

Likewise, Reddit's individual threads are bonfires, its frontpage feed is a stream and its 'best of last week/month/year' is an organically structured garden. But these multi-faceted applications still tend to be grounded in one particular core function.

Comms Analogues

As laid out in the stack post, I prefer to group the building blocks for online communications tooling into four distinct components:

digital-metaphors
By Lise

To broaden our perspective, we can retrofit those four components for different time periods.

Comms protocols in pre-literate society

With pre-literate protocols it's also a lot easier to see the similarities between ourselves and social animals such as wolves, whales or magpies.

Comms protocols in proto-literal society

In the proto-literal era we adopt technological aids external to our own bodies, already closely resembling their future digital counterparts.

The Predicament

You'll notice that the vast majority of the real world examples of applications listed above (Google, Discord, Twitter..) are part of a closed platform offering, which is a problem:

Identity prison

And therein lies my predicament: Ever since I first logged on to the internet, I've never had legitimate ownership of my own digital identity. My digital expression has always been mediated through some higher power. Sadly not of the paternal kind that intends to lift my spirit up until I can stand on my own.

No, for as long as I've lived my digital identity has been in the hands of an opaque and authoritarian power that intends to capitalize on my innate desire for expression by means of identity lock-in. The powers-that-be have been fairly benevolent, sure, but my independence is and never was their end-game.

But all hope is not lost. An open social web is possible, and it is in no way an understatement to say that our interpersonal relationships as well as democratic institutions will be far better off for it.

Digital autonomy begets individual freedom begets fairness & equality.

The hopeful possibility of this moment lies in the open-social web protocols which make up the foundations of a comms & coordination ecosystem owned and operated by the general public.

We have yet to bring these components together into one cohesive communications product, wherein messages and knowledge artifacts can move seamlessly from one flow-mode to the next and your identity remains the same throughout. Yet this ideal is closer to becoming reified than you might think.

Here's how I intend to do it, with a little lot of help from my friends.

Part 1: Weird Identity

Before I can interact with other netizens, I need an online persona to make my digital self presentable and increasingly trustworthy. That's what Weird is all about. Most basically it's an open source equivalent to Linktree, supercharged by self-sovereign identity.

Weird will aggregate your fragmented persona into a single unified view. Establish your little slice of home on the internet without getting stuck in the content-production imperative of a custom website or a blog.

Then, thanks to the commodification of ID tech steered by the OIDC standard, Weird can grow up to become a full-fledged identity provider by standing on the sturdy shoulders of rauthy. Meaning, you can 'Login with Weird' and use it as a kind of Gravatar on steroids. This will enable seamless login to all of the additional services we want to plug into our community stack.

Part 2: Communal Bonfires

Next, we need a place for people to congregate. Group chat is the best way to seed a grassroots community: Get two or more people with a shared interest together in a room and watch the magic of minimum-viable sociality bloom!

'Online community platforms' are assembly-kits for large, communal bonfires, designed to draw people towards the light and into the warm togetherness of community. I think the primary function of bonfire software is to create space for group-scale discourse.

Part 3: Gentle streams of Kitsune

With our safe spaces set up for baseline networking and greenfield content generation, we can move on to broadcasting.

Chat rooms are information silos. Forum threads can crack through the walls of the silo as linkable, search-friendly message exports. But for certain types of content, like an announcement, it's not enough to just be discoverable; you want reach. Rather than waiting to be found, broadcasted content calls out so it may be heard far and wide. That's where the viral properties of ActivityPub and its fedi-friends come into play, plugged into our stack with Kitsune.

Kitsune is protocol-centric, made explicitly to interoperate with Mastodon and other AP applications.

Superpowers:

Part 4: Noospheric Gardens

By now we've got:

  1. a home base.
  2. a shared place for nascent social activity to emerge and mix.
  3. a broadcasting antenna to distribute select messages past the confines of our local community.

This is already a healthy environment for social connection and information to thrive. Communities in which ephemeral togetherness is the goal will be well covered by these three components.

But if you're engaged in building a product of growing complexity you need a way to glue information fragments together into cohesive artifacts of knowledge, otherwise the abundance of information will increasingly turn into disorganized noise; a form of informational tech debt.

To help us continuously convert messy noise into an orderly signal (like a song), we need a protocol for thought: Noosphere.

Noosphere is a massively-multiplayer knowledge graph. The technical pillars that Noosphere builds upon are:

Above this substructure, Noosphere gives users:

  • Entry to a zero-trust, decentralized network of self-sovereign nodes
  • Human-readable names for peers and their public content
  • Local-first authoring and offline-available content with conflict-free synchronization
  • A complete, space-efficient revision history for any content
  • Coherence and compatibility with the hypertext web

You can think of it like a world-wide Wiki.

Basically GDocs/Notion meets Git: made for knowledge connectivity and cross-pollination as opposed to disparate content silos. It’s also the final and most complete form of what I call ‘socialized proof of work’.

Beyond the foundational building blocks mentioned here, countless sub-components can be added to our stack as 3rd party integrations or bundled add-ons.

Weird can be extended with lightweight blog and inline CMS functionality.

Streams & Gardens are greatly enhanced by read-it-later apps and RSS readers.

All of Identity, Bonfire and Stream can be deeply complemented by Stalwart Mail Server; with a slightly different framing the email protocol would have been listed as another top-level component.

An immense amount of work has already gone into the communications infrastructure of the world wide web. All the essential tech we need is already made. What’s missing is a coordinated effort to point our collective innovations in the same direction, towards digital emancipation as our final destination.

There’s no good reason for our global nation of netizens to remain beholden to the corporate conglomerates who co-opted our digital commons to sell it back to us.

When you’re able, if only for a moment, stop building for survival and begin building for liberty.

The Great Untangling: