Ive been increasingly thinking about the League of Nations over the last three years .
… and that ‘four second handshake’ between Queen Elizabeth I/II and Martin McGuinness, something which involved an inordinate amount of ugly and painful discussions (both within camps and between).
In the 1990s you would have been told to fuck off if you suggested that Ireland and UK would be cohosting a football tournament.
But enough networks were brought to bear to harmonise allies and enemies around the table so that The Goodfriday Agreement became a protocol.
This isnt to mean there is absolute peace or justice but people gave up enough of themselves to ensure that new patterns could emerge.
Thinking about another analogy, the EU is an example of social systems being part of the political discourse but evidently as the younger sibling to the kernel of the ‘Coal and Steel Pact’ as a means of economic interdependency to secure cooperative behaviours.
The system has evolved to break down demarcations over the decade.
Subsidiarity is one of the things which became of greater importance as the bloc grew and became more heterogenous.
Indeed EU is another example based on shared vision - to greatly simplify it - of how integrated internal markets would lead to such dependencies between countries to provide enough incentives to keep lasting peace with one another. Other than that indeed it is far from perfect, to the extent that most people have a love/hate relationship to it. Where it comes to lack of nuance in discussions there are many people stating “EU = evil → discard!” and throw the baby out with the bath water, as EU represents a “best-we-have” and the value judgment of “evil” is based on singular unnuanced areas where EU operates. What is the transition path to a better system, other than bloody revolution, is then usually not a subject that can be constructively held with such people.
For the fediverse we can collectively conclude and enumerate the activist causes we hold dear, and after the observation that “Meta = evil”, try to define what are value-aligned sustainable business efforts that we do embrace as beneficial to the ecosystem (if any), and where we start drawing the line. Then follow up with how we can defend that line.
Its worth noting that the EU is risk adverse regarding accession of countries (becoming members), which would also include returning members.
When it comes to standards bodies I take a logarithmic attitude to integrity regarding stakeholders’ scale.
For instance, Willy Heidinger type problems are likely to dominate a lot of flow and suffering for at least a generation.
Its imperative to ensure that greater attention is directed towards embargoing pernicious enterprises from comitology committees (among other means of formalising protection) - including regarding Fediverse and Internet technologies.
I dont have the context behind a recent EEE post being censored elsewhere but that sounds rather disappointing (and I dont have the spoons).
Directing attention towards volunteer groups or even individuals is more likely to be counterproductive (my use of the word ‘tabloid’ earlier is still ringing in my head).
Especially, as alluded to by my first post today that its actually important to be able to work with antagonists to resolve collective problems - but this can be achieved with respectful dialogues with subordinates in a system rather than an institution/entity itself.
I’m not sure if the state of this has changed, but I want to emphasize that this is an important point. We should be able to have FEP discussions somewhere in the Fediverse and then have them archived and accessible in a central place, e.g. SocialHub.
As a slight mea culpa, I have probably said in the past that archiving Fediverse conversations is not cool. We do not want a big tech giant, e.g. Meta, to vacuum up all the Fediverse posts and use them to train their AI models, or whatever. So one needs to put some thoughts into this type of archiving feature It cannot be “just archive”..
I guess there are different types of Fediverse conversations: those related to ActivityPub and FEPs are definitely of public importance and should be consolidated; those related to personal discussions should definitely avoid Big Tech (a shorter term for global surveillance and nudging). Note that having a central point for “archives” is not necessarily good enough to avoid Big Tech: E2EE should be preferred.
As for the meaning of “archives” in the context of the SocialHub, it’s more like a shared conversation space that holds over time, in the sense of mailing-list archives, except that here you can quote from the past and interlink conversations that were not previously linked (mailing-list archives do not have this hypertextual fabric).
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