Building community within Social.Coop

edit: This is a long post, with ideas that challenge the basic function of social.coop, and doesn't have any direct relation to current social.coop governance decisions. If this is frustrating for any reason, it's not for you, and that's okay. Feel free to disregard the whole thing.

Understanding where we are

I'd like your help with building community within social.coop. I'm afraid some members might think this unnecessary, that we're already a community, or that we don't have the time or people-power to maintain any more projects.

I'd like to start by sharing my perspective, in the hopes that you might see what I see, of where we are, and where we could be.

I believe that social.coop isn't a community so much as it is more akin to a public square, open to guests and visitors, where a number of people spend their time. All of us here in this open square are aware that we, nominally, control and operate this public square. It is ours. However, ownership manifests from control, which is to say, the ability to shape a space. At some point, this public square was built. The masons laid the bricks, and some carpenters put up gazebos, and some benches were installed. All these things were done with an understanding that making a space comfortable for people is the first step of inviting people in. We are all people who seek connection to other people. We want to share the things we care about with other people, and connect on a deeper level with people who share our values. We seek to build community, and the first step of building community was to make a space where community is possible to grow.

My family lacks community

A community is defined by many different things.

Principally, a community can be understood by the proximity of its members to each other. A family could be said to be in community with one another if they all share a household, share meals, cook for each other, and support each other's needs. These are all important aspects of community cohesion, however it's important to understand that proximity comes in many different varieties.

My own family are not a particularly functional community, although they try very hard. They all live in the same house, in a rural area far away from large cities. It's an intergenerational household, where my younger brother, my parents, an uncle, and my grandparents live. The house is plenty large for all of them. There's a sizable dining room, and the main living areas are spacious enough for extended family to visit during holidays. It looks like the house of a community. It's got all the parts that you'd expect a community to have, however it doesn't function like a community.

My brother gets home from school, goes to his room and watches videos on his phone, or puts on his VR headset. His friend from school also has a VR headset and sometimes they play together in VR. Largely, he plays in VRchat style social games. He often gets upset at the other people in the games he plays. If the time on his VR headset has run out, he watches videos on his phone. If he expends his daily allowed internet time on his phone, he walks around, phone in hand, talking to Siri, making the voice assistant say funny things, or answering banal meaningless questions.

My parents get home from work. My mom is a teacher, and my dad works in construction. My mom sits in her chair at her desk in her bedroom and opens up her tablet and plays some multiplayer mobile game. My dad sets his lunchbox on the counter and sits at the dining table and opens up the same mobile game. This is how my parents spend their time "together."

Some days my dad cooks dinner, usually by himself. Some days we order food from a fast food place in the nearby town.

My grandparents, home all day, sometimes cook things for the family meal in the afternoon. On the days it's not their turn to cook, they spend all day watching TV shows on their TV in their separate section of the house, which is set up like its own apartment. They play their own mobile games. My grandmother's health is failing. Some days she stays in bed, some days she gets out of bed, to spend the day in her easy chair, on her tablet.

My uncle lives in an separate building on the property. He spends almost all of his time playing video games. His own building is set up as a semi-independent structure, with its own laundry, bathroom, water supply.

My family has some livestock. Every day, my uncle and my grandpa go out and feed the goats. My grandma will collect food scraps and feed them to the chickens. On the days she has strength, she'll go out and collect eggs.

At the end of most days, everyone will get together to share a family meal, then they all return to their own corners of the house.

From a simple description of how people spend their time, who they're around physically is different from who they're around socially, and their lives are very fragmented. Their community is fragmented.

My parents put together their money to buy this house. They wanted a place where they could provide a place to live for my grandparents, and host family, support my uncle, raise their children. They brought together all the tools and resources to provide a space for family, for community. They are not a community.

A community is built around shared purpose, vision, intention, values, and most importantly, shared time. We are defined by how we spend our time, and who we surround ourselves with. My brother is less a part of the family, and more a node for the games and digital spaces he engages with, whose physical form happens to occupy my family's house.

A community is built around empowerment to shape that community, to have a meaningful impact on how the space is shaped, and support from fellow community members in shaping that space.

My family's house is a mess. No one truly believes they have any kind of power over the space. No one takes responsibility for how the spaces are shaped. Cleaning is an imposition on everyone's time that they'd rather be spending elsewhere. My grandparents maintain their own space, but I can tell they have difficulty mustering the energy to wash their cooking dishes.

My family is not a community. They're a bunch of people who share a space, who have a tenuous connection to each other, and some level of dependence on each other, but have little trust in each other to meet their needs, past cooking dinner. In some ways, they're people who live on entirely different worlds, and through habit and obligation, they leave their own worlds sometimes and share fragments of a world together, but they never spend enough time together in that combined, fragmented world, to build it up into something better.

I believe that social.coop is a space where community can thrive, but just like my family, it takes recognizing each other's needs, and supporting each other in building up community, and most of all, sharing a world together. My family can help each other, they're physically capable of it, but the most difficult part of it is asking for help. Everyone wants to be a helper, and everyone feels like a burden for asking for help. They feel like their own world is the only place that they can feel safe, and so they don't invite each other into their worlds, and no one wants to be in anyone else's world because they don't understand it.

Social.coop is a space where community is possible

Back to the Public Square metaphor.

Social.coop has been built very mindfully and intentionally, to provide a space where people can connect to other people, with the hope being that a community would grow together, and work together to build bigger and better things. We know that better things are possible, that we can achieve good things with other people. So we reach out to other people, and try to learn from them. We all have our own struggles, and we know that help from other people would be incredibly valuable for us in our struggles.

Social.coop is a public square in the fediverse, a city of public squares. Having built this, we're able to go visit any number of those other public squares, with their own distinct community flavor and decoration, and we recognize that this connection to other people unlike ourselves is valuable to us, to our understanding of the world. Having built this public square, and shared it as the space where we all exist together, we see the function of this space as a way to enable us to connect to all those other people in the wider city of the fediverse. The shape of the space makes it clear that there is our corner, Social.coop, and there's other spaces that aren't social.coop. However, the flow and shape of our space in relation to the rest of the city is such that the distinction between "in here" and "out there" is very marginal. The masons and carpenters that built it were following a blueprint which said there should be no walls between the public spaces, because it benefits everyone to be able to see what everyone is talking about, and then there's some small accommodations for enabling people to only be visible to people that they know and trust on some level, and also to have small, private conversations.

The architect of the blueprint thought that the best shape of the community should be that every community is open to every other community, and if there were to be any more limited sharing, that limited sharing should also extend to any other community in the city. (I'm talking here about one of the only concessions to limiting reach of public posts, in the "followers-only" publish option, which ensures that even if someone wants to publish only to their own community, everyone has their own different set of followers, so each person has a completely unique bubble of followers which comprises their own "community")

One consequence of this is that, besides the decorations, there is little to distinguish our space and the members of our space, from other spaces and members of other spaces. Within the city, the distinction is essntially negligible. Very few of us are carpenters or masons. We mostly don't know how to shape the space, which means that the control that we have is limited to asking the carpenters and masons to change different parts of the space to suit our needs more effectively.

These indistinct boundaries between "inside" and "outside" social.coop also make it much more difficult to relate to each other, and to build trust. The way the space is shaped is such that someone passing by can overhear something I'm saying to someone in the space, someone who I would like to develop trust with, and maybe reach out to, in order to give help or get help, and this passer-by can step into the conversation and derail it, causing frustration between us, the members of the space, and impeding that trust from developing.

Boundaries make our lives richer

Here I will define boundaries, because a shared vocabulary is incredibly important. A boundary is very simply the distinction between where one person ends and another begins. Healthy emotional boundaries enable people to distinguish themselves and their own emotions, from other people and their emotions. Boundaries also exist between communities in physical space. San Frascisco's boundary with Oakland is the San Franscisco bay. This makes the two cities distinct separate places. Weak boundaries make it difficult to distinguish the self from others. I'm upset because my parents are upset, but is that really reasonable? The same can also be true of physical spaces. Los Angeles has poor physical boundaries. It's made up of a lot of smaller towns and cities, who don't really get along or agree on much, spread over multiple counties, connected by hundreds of miles of freeway, with the only level of government that's really shared being that they're all within california. Sounds a lot like the fediverse to me.

The lack of boundaries, and ability for people to restrict the interactions with other people to only those who share context and understanding, is an incredible constant stressor and frustration for people on fediverse. It's natural for people to want to reach out to other people, to be understood. To understand other people, with different experiences and perspectives, is difficult. It takes effort, and focus, and kindness, and not everyone always has those things to spare.

Some people have effort and focus and kindness to spare, and see the value of sharing those things with other people, to expend the effort to help them be understood. Within a community, this is incredibly valuable. As a member of a community reaching out to another member of another community, this can also be incredibly valuable. Building mutual understanding with other people and communities helps build bridges between communities.

The shape of the fediverse enables behavior and cycles that might otherwise be mitigated by healthy community boundaries, which are, as mentioned, intentionally designed to be difficult to implement. What do I mean by this? It takes energy to be understood by sharing our own context and understanding, while also trying to understand someone else's context and understanding. We, as people, sometimes get frustrated about the world, about things that happen to us, and often desire to express these frustrations to a sympathetic ear. Someone might want to get advice on their frustration, and they post this publicly. They cry out in the public square about their frustration. What they need in that moment is sympathy and support. Someone passing by the public square sees this cry for help, and stops and tells them "based on my understanding of the world, your frustration is stupid." This doesn't help the person who's frustrated, and in fact worsens their frustration. Now their frustration is redirected towards the new focus, this person who responded unkindly. Now, someone who is more sympathetic, and understands the frustrated person's context of their original frustration, might try to address their original frustration, and help support them in it, but that's no longer enough, because that person now has a new frustration, which is that asshole who told me I'm stupid!

From this framework, it may be easy to see where things have gone wrong. Frustrations are best expressed and responded to in a private space. The design of our space, our instance on the fediverse, restricts us to "one person" "a few people" "a bunch of people" and "everyone" when posting. Without a trusted person to confide in privately to express frustrations, it's common to try to resort to "everyone" to have as good of chances as possible to try to get help addressing frustration. The shape of our spaces means it takes effort and specific intention to talk to each other more than the rest of the network, which means that building those interpersonal connections to each other also takes intentional effort, and sometimes even people within the space who want to reach out to other people in the space don't have anyone or a specific group they can trust enough to help them, and so they broadcast to everyone which leads to unsympathetic people contributing unhelpful perspectives. This leads to more frustrations, and the cycle continues.

Building community by reaching for each other

I get the feeling that a lot of people recognize the frustration, the feeling of isolation and alienation that this constant exposure to unsympathetic voices and perspectives imposes on our space. One solution to these frustrations and feelings of isolation is to use the tools familiar to us, to try to make our world bigger, to cast our social net wider, in the hopes that more people who are sympathetic to us will fall into it. The wider we cast our net, the farther the people are to us that we share our space with, and the harder it is for us to reach each other, as each of us becomes a smaller part of each other's world.

In an attempt to grasp onto a feeling of community by expanding our reach to more people, I fear that a consequence is that we grow farther apart from each other. Just like how my family, in an attempt to fill their time with their media and games, ends up growing disconnected from each other in the same house, and as things feel worse, they reach out more intensely to these tools that are familiar to them.

I fear if we continue to use Expanding Reach as the primary tool with which we attempt to build community, that our world will slowly get shittier, as the influence of the people close to us is further and further diluted by the influence of the whole of the network, where the people who care are far outnumbered by the people who don't understand.

Through my survey efforts, I've gotten to know a little bit about a lot of you. Some of us are lonely. Some of us are optimistic. Some of us are isolated. Some of us are building great things that we want to share with the world. Some of us are all of these things and more.

Most of you probably don't know much about me besides that I've put a lot of effort into this project. Maybe now you know a little bit more. I grew up with the family I've described. I know that if they worked together to share their world, that they could build a better world together.

social.coop isn't my family. Some of you I consider friends. A lot of us care about each other. A lot of us want to help each other build a better world.

The best way to build a better world, the only way to build a better world, is to start where you are. This has been my attempt to share my understanding of where we are. I have an idea of where we could be, what we could do together. It's up to all of us to put together our ideas for a better world, and collectively put them into action.

Let's learn by teaching and doing. The world gets a bit brighter whenever we teach each other how to do something we didn't know how to do before. Our lives are enriched by teaching each other and learning from each other.

An invitation to all members to build community, in meatspace and on the f-hub IRC

I've learned a few things from my census of the social.coop instance. I've learned that there are large concentrations of members around Portland, San Francisco, Massachusetts (and the wider US Northeast) and in the UK. Outside of those specific places, members are largely much more dispersed. Some members are even nomadic, like myself, traveling around the US, around Europe, or even the world.

Something shared in common between most of the members who are in those more concentrated areas, is that they are likely already members of some kind of community or group effort, and are a part of social.coop to reach out, and find more people like themselves.

Something shared in common between many of the members who are dispersed throughout the US and the world, is that they are looking for community. They are looking for connection to other people, to understand and be understood. To be recognized for who they are, and to share who they are with other people, and be a part of some community or group effort.

I've done a lot of the legwork of understanding the dynamics of our space, where people are, and how people connect to each other. I'm going to send out group DMs to people who share a region together. If you are one of the members in the Pacific Northwest, California, the US Northeast, or in the UK, and you're interested in helping build community, and taking on the responsibility of connecting people together, to share physical and digital spaces, reach out to your fellow local social.coop members and do it.

I've spent a few hours over the past couple weeks organizing a more private online community space for people to engage with each other in. I mentioned publicly that I'd like to find an IRC to provide a digital space for social.coop members, and @[email protected] responded inviting social.coop to set up shop on the f-hub IRC server.

This IRC service is open to all members of social.coop.

This IRC server has bridges to matrix and XMPP, and I spent some time working on documenting the IRC to Matrix bridge. I now have a basic guide on how to operate the IRC bridge from Matrix, which pulls information from several other guides and my own tinkering, to help people who want to join the IRC who are already on Matrix, and don't want to maintain another chat program.

Kris also maintains their own guides for operating IRC which are well documented, and a good starting point for anyone who wants to get started and is comfortable with text interfaces.

For anyone else who wants to join, and learns best through direct personal interaction and coaching, I am happy to share my time to help other members learn how to join and operate IRC. I ask that, as my time is limited, and in the interest of building community, that as people join and learn how to use the IRC service, they share what they've learned with new people who join, helping them learn as well. This is part of how community grows, and this is how knowledge is shared.

I'm planning to host regular watch parties, video chats, and other streams for dispersed and nomadic members of social.coop that all members are welcome to join. These will be planned in the IRC, and published on social.coop.

How to join the f-hub IRC

The best way to access the f-hub IRC is through their dedicated web interface at https://irc.f-hub.org

I invite anyone who would like personal support learning how to join and operate the f-hub IRC, to dm me @katanova on social.coop. If you've joined the IRC and would like help, type `/msg katanova hey, I'd like some help` and if I'm online I'll help you.

Help in learning how to use IRC, or for help fixing a problem can also be found in the #support channel, which is the default join option in the web interface.

Please keep in mind that someone might not always be available, so if it seems like no one is online, feel free to DM me.

Anyone who is familiar with IRC is welcome to join the #support channel and help people learn how to use IRC.

I have already set up a channel for dispersed members in #SC-dispersed and for all social.coop members in #SC-general

These can be joined with `/join #SC-dispersed` and `/join #SC-general` once you're in the IRC

Anyone is free to make their own channel dedicated to their own group effort or local community. I ask that channels created by social.coop members be prefaced with "#SC-" in order to distinguish them from the existing channels on the server. Members of social.coop in the concentrated regions, or who are collaborating on any community project are invited to host their community chat on the IRC, and if they do, I would be happy to provide personal support.

Kris (poVoq on the f-hub IRC) has agreed to grant me admin privileges for the purposes of resolving name and registration conflicts, and to help support the community. Members with experience in operating IRC who would also like to share the load in administrating the IRC server are welcome to reach out to me or kris to request authority.

Kris' guide for how to operate the IRC service is here: https://wiki.f-hub.org/books/chat-network/page/common-irc-commands (the note at the top to apply for an LDAP account is incorrect, if you'd like to register an account, register it as normal within IRC)

We can build great things when we share responsibility

A lot of members are aware of how much time I've spent on the community in the past few weeks. This is not time I've spent with some expectation of some personal benefit or return. This is time that I've spent out of a faith that the people I share this space with, are worth it. I've taken on a lot of responsibility in this project, that no one has asked me to do. It can be hard to trust other people enough with something to let go of responsibility, to bring other people in. Responsibility can be addicting, because if I'm the only one who has control of something, I don't have to worry about someone else breaking it, or doing something wrong with it. I see a lot of ways that people shape the world by refusing to hand off responsibility, and the way they shape the world is that the part of the world that they have responsibility for, that they have control over, is restricted by what they can comprehend, and little further.

I'm taking all this work that I've put into this project, and sharing it with everyone, making it our shared responsibility. I don't need to be involved in every little bit of it. I don't need to know everything that's going on as part of it.

This is work that I am sharing freely with all the members of social.coop

Moving forward

I'm hoping that we can start up a sister instance using the Bonfire Network software. I don't have the skills to do that, and I know some other folks on social.coop do.

I invite anyone with the skills to get together, reach out to the bonfire development team, and figure out what's needed to get started.

It's really common for people to wait for other people to reach out, to be asked for help. I get the feeling that a lot of us are waiting for just the right circumstances to come along, to get invited to help with something, so we can know that what we're doing is helpful, or the right thing.

I'm hoping that this project can serve as inspiration to other members of social.coop waiting to be invited. I undertook this project myself. I have no authority over anyone else. I sent out messages asking people if they're okay with being involved, and the resounding answer was "Yes! Thank you for doing this!"

I asked for consent and all along the way, I was open about what I was doing, and used the skills, time, and energy I have to fulfill a shortcoming I saw in the way our space operates, sharing what I've learned along the way.

You can do the same. Ask others for help and consent. Share what you've learned. Share what you've made. Invite people to join.

Thank you for your time. I hope we'll build something great together.