log.ryanatkn.com

revised and tooted about my second blog post, "Modeling virtual social spaces: in this house we post cat pics on Saturday", with more on Mastodon:

@ntnsndr@social.coop (Mastodon): WIth ntnsndr.in/ImplicitFeudalism in mind, I'm curious whether there is any possibility of checking the power of Control? Is there a way in which that could be non-absolute?

@ryanatkn@hci.social (Mastodon): Yeah! Here's how we're thinking about it right now with Felt. Still ratcheting up the ladder to climb out of the feudal hole.

Control is held at the group/org/community level (Felt names these "hubs" now) by actors. In the default hub template the creator gets the all-powerful "steward" role, but the hub itself has an actor, and control is transferable/sharable. The hub actor's actions are controllable by automated/assisted/direct processes. Other group actors could be involved.

to clarify, "steward" is just the name for a role in the default hub template and a convenient way to reference the idea, they can be constrained with fine-grained permissions like any other customizable role - this contrasts with Slack (no customizable roles) and Discord (coarse-grained permissions)

given this API you could design a set of roles that split powers, separating/balancing concerns

hub templates make it easy to share pre-fab designs with the initial roles/permissions/etc

In our implementation, actors are assigned roles which have permissions. You helped me realize that by splitting permissions among roles we could support non-absolute power with this: hci.social/@ryanatkn/109770994846184255

An all-powerful group actor's actions could result from collective governance processes

or, I think we can support designing systems with structural checks and balances through permission assignment, so any actors could have mutually co-checking subsets of permissions in a hub

That's the first-order UX prioritized by end users. This second part is ignorable by most people most of the time, but for the governance enthusiast:

Hubs are hosted on infrastructure controlled by "operator" actors. These have the power to pull the plug, and may technically have hub control bypassing stewards, like modifying a database.

Maybe there's instance/server/etc levels between infra and hub, but that's an impl detail. Felt has instances controlled by "admins".

The operator actor could be co-ops/nonprofits/other orgs, or as you've written about, bl0ckchains or similar. Bchain enthusiasm makes sense here b/c the operator won't pull the plug or modify the db barring acts of God. Felt.social plans to be a platform co-op operator providing infra.

btw I love this so much, Boba Board (boba.social) has leaned into *explicit* feudalism for their fandom communities, owning it right in the brand! "Be the Monarch of Your Own Realm!"

link

added the Board view to Felt - it's like a chat room but upside-down, so the input is at the top and content flows downward, replies are nested, and the newest posts and replies appear at the top: github.com/feltjs/felt-server/pull/663