A native path out of the mess people make on the #openweb

The Open Governance Body (#OGB) describes a permissionless process/structure that is open and allows the group that forms using the tools to decide who is a part of the group or not. This process can divide into a web of connecting instances of governance as a natural human process of group formation. The #OGB emphasizes that there is no exclusion and always diversity, making it a natural fit for the #fediverse.

The #OGB also shows that if people are stupid and focused on individualism, each governance instance will have one member and no power. To gain power, people have to work together, which is built into the code. The #OGB emphasizes that hoarding power is limited, and it flows through the community, energizing and solidifying the community and building horizontal power to challenge/change vertical power.

The #OGB focus is on the importance of keeping things simple (#KISS) and that some people will try to push for existing power structures before democracy. However, as the process is permissionless, it is not possible to stop them from doing this. The #OGB emphasizes the need to do better, and that being native to the #fediverse is a big help in this regard.

The #OGB emphasizes the importance of recognizing where power comes from in the context of the #fediverse. The fediverse operates differently from corporations, governments, courts, and police, and it is important to think and build with this difference rather than trying to drag the fediverse back to the #mainstreaming path.

The #OGB builds from the #fediverse works because it is different, and it is easy to forget this important thing when #mainstreaming agendas grab and hold. The #OGB suggests that the missing question in almost all conversations is “who are we empowering,” and emphasizes the need to do better in alt-tech.

The #OGB notes that there are problems in alt-tech and suggests that starting with the #4opens would remove 90% of the mess, revealing the real potential for good outcomes. The #OGB highlights that doing better in alt-tech would involve using shovels to make compost and planting seeds of the world we want to see.

The #OGB describes the process scaffolding for the governance body as a default effect, where the decisions on how things work will be up to the members of the body. The power of the governance body is only the power of default, and the #OGB is about removing all hard default choices and building in a small number of KISS tools, then letting the body members work out themselves how to use them.

The #OGB uses the example of #Couchsurfing, where the website redesign removed the #DIY tools active Couchsurfers had used to self-organize, leading to disappointment among members. The #OGB argues that letting members make their own process, open vs. closed, is necessary to overcome the #geekproblem and have hope for alt-tech.

The #OGB builds governance with the way, rules, norms, and actions are structured, sustained, regulated, and held accountable. this is to mediate that the #Fediverse currently has a “herding cats” governance, denoting a futile attempt to control or organize a class of entities that are inherently uncontrollable.

The #OGB codebase is not just a tool for the #Fediverse, but it can be used to democratically run any structures that have stakeholders.

The #OGB provides an example of how the codebase can be used to run a local street market, with each stallholder as a stakeholder, people who shop at the market as users, and the local council, events company, and shop owner’s association as affiliate groups. The #OGB approach and codebase will scale sideways, with street markets governed city-wide, and each of the markets becoming a stakeholder, users as users, and city-wide orgs and groups as affiliate groups.

The #OGB shaping of the “body” comes from a long history/experience of horizontal activism, where “those who do the work have more say.” https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Do-ocracy

The #OGB pushes that the bulk of the voice comes from those who run the #Fediverse, the people who run/support the instances. The people who build the tools also get a say, as do support orgs and events, and the users who will be spread widely get a say, but their power is diluted by the much larger numbers involved.

This working practice comes from 30 years of building from The Tyranny of Structureless tick box list https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody/wiki/03.-The-Tyranny-of-Stucturelessness That code being quite “anti-human” is an interesting challenge, and it’s important to figure out how to get the humane “mess” in a coding process that is based on being “exact” and in control #OGB

The #OGB project is grounded in lived experience, and it’s a way out of this mess. We cannot keep using traditional institutions. We have to stop the #techcurn if we are going to use #openweb tech for social/ecological change/challenge, and we need to think about this now.

The #OGB project is about developing better ways of having “trust” based conversations and “trust” based “governance” in the #openweb. The project is built from hundreds of years of on the ground organizing that has shaped every “freedom” we enjoy and is done in a #KISS approach. The #OGB is a #fedivers native way of working, NOT a #mainstreaming way, and it comes from directly working, setting up, and solving recurring problems at hundreds of direct action protest camps.

The #OGB focus on what we know works, as at the moment, almost nothing works for social good. The #OGB project is what is needed, a voluntary cooperative and collaborative alliance that is native to the #fediverse.

The thinking is that we need to put a stop to the #techchurn as we have piles of #techshit already to compost, that #nothingnew is a hashtag for this.

It’s not the goal of the #OGB project to create an organization that tells everyone what protocols and standards to use in the #fediverse. The #OGB project is about developing better ways of having good “trust” based conversations and “trust” based “governance” in the #openweb

To sum up, the current working models of “governance” in open-source projects are monarchy, aristocracy and oligarchy. This is the rock star developer, the coders and the funders. It should be obverse to anyone that 99.99% of people are missing from this feudalistic ideal of “governance”.

Democracy is the basic foundation of our shared modernity.

WHY DO WE PUT UP WITH THIS MESS IN TECH?

Let’s take a different path, please #OGB

Q. that is an optimistic projection

A. I have no illusion that the normal shitty behaver of fucking people over and being a prat will happen, but the codebase is designed to mediate this crap behaver for better outcomes 🙂

#OGB “permissionless” is an important word that needs some thought. The body is made up of three different, balanced groups: stakeholders, users, and affiliate stakeholders. Anybody can become a stakeholder by setting up and running an active instance, and users are self-explanatory. That affiliate stakeholders are a little more complex and are treated differently, and it’s up to the body itself to decide if they play an active and useful role.

That nothing in this is top-down, elitist, discriminatory, or undemocratic, and it’s #KISS and looks safe to the “normal world” while being native to the #fediverse and its roots. All the coding is #4opens, based on #activertypub.

With #OGB, it’s important not to get lost in the #processgeeks and their dogmatic love of #formalconsensus, as that’s a dead end and has been for the 30 years of activism and coding tech. It’s important to keep the #OGB both #KISS and human, understandable. The #OGB is native “governance” and federates in the same way as the projects it “governs”. That this approach is counterintuitive to mainstream ideas and “common sense,” but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

This approach has worked to some extent, as seen in the “#Fediverse” as a living example, working to scale small to bigger. There will be lots of “smoke,” and help is needed to keep the project clear of this mess. We have to overcome our #stupidindividualism to have a hope of a better world.

#OGB To remind you that the need for “governance” came out of a practical problem where the #activitypub community is made up of “cats” who were doing seminars outreach to powerful #EU Eurocrats on why they should be interested in #activertypub. #OGB is designed to be messy and not tidy, and it’s a “governance” of a disorganization, not a traditional power structure. “governance” can cooperate with more formal models of governance like traditional cooperatives.

"We get exponential growth based on having one protocol, not a half dozen. [..] standards aren’t about competition. They’re about cooperation".

Great article by @evanprodromou . I completely agree, #ActivityPub has to win if we want to have a great social web. Don't get seduced by the shiny marketing of the next VC driven social network (protocol).

https://evanp.me/2023/10/06/activitypub-the-socialcg-and-the-social-web/

Evan Prodromou

2023-10-06 19:39:05

I have some strong feelings about the social web (aka “the fediverse”) right now. I don’t aways communicate them well, because they feel so essential to me, which can be frustrating for my friends, colleagues and allies. I want to set out some steps for my reasoning.

• I think the social web is very important. Distributing the locus of control on social computing from monolithic services to individuals, families, clubs, civic groups, universities, coops, and a competitive market is important for everyone.
• We are at the cusp of exponential growth of the social web. The current time is like no other we’ve ever had.
• We get exponential growth based on having one protocol, not a half dozen. I think Blue Sky, Nostr, and others are a threat to ActivityPub breaking out and becoming ubiquitous. There can’t be multiple winners. I often reference Metcalfe’s Law in this regard; one big connected internetwork is much better than 3 or 4 disconnected ones.
• ActivityPub has a claim to being The Social Network Protocol, because it was standardized by the W3C. Protocols are not a meritocracy; it’s not like the best protocols always win. Usually, just the opposite. Protocols with a claim to official sanction, and wide adoption, win.
• Keeping a clean line of legitimacy for AP, and a good relationship with the W3C, is key. The SocialCG is the designated steward of the spec. People know to come to the CG to participate in the spec. That’s good. We want that to keep happening.
• Any proposals that talk about taking AP away from the CG, or forking it, or making experimental versions, are really, really bad for the fediverse. There is no improvement you could make to ActivityPub that justifies breaking backwards compatibility, undercutting the protocol’s legitimacy, and splitting the network. Everything needs to be incremental, backwards compatible, W3C- and SocialCG-led, and support rather than inhibit growth.

A lot of people don’t agree with me on these. They may think that it’s great to have lots of protocols competing, in the same way it’s great to have lots of vendors competing in a market; that competition makes protocols better. But that’s not the case; standards aren’t about competition. They’re about cooperation. A compatible, connected internetwork makes all implementations more popular and better used; see the aforementioned Metcalfe’s Law. We need to agree on standards, and compete on implementations.

Some people also think that changing the way a Collection is represented in ActivityPub will make the whole thing “better” because if you are reading the JSON-LD on the wire, it will be more elegant and conceptually sound. This is a bad definition of “better”. “Better” for ActivityPub should mean, it helps more people connect to more other people they care about. And sometimes that means using the existing, well-implemented methods, even if they’re not as beautiful to you when you’re writing code as your own ideas are.

Others think that there’s still time for incompatible changes to AP — hitting the big “reset” button and getting the dozens of implementations on the fediverse today to rewrite their federation code to reject Note objects and only accept Microblog ones, or something similar. There is not, in fact, time for that.

Finally, some people think that a casual specification, without a standards organisation behind it, will be more responsive to developers and users. I definitely think there is room to develop experimental protocols on top of AP, but we have an extension mechanism for that. We can have a stable, dependable core, and have cool, new, fast-moving extensions. They’re not incompatible.

I want to see ActivityPub win, so we can have a great social web. I’m going to keep trying to make AP, the SocialCG, and the social web stable, dependable, and iteratively developing. I hope others agree and will do the same.

https://evanp.me/2023/10/06/activitypub-the-socialcg-and-the-social-web/

the idea that quality does not necessarily increase with functionality

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

Hi there @Friendica Support,
I wonder if there are PHP versions to recommend when running friendica.

In older versions (2019-12 + 2021.01-04) I experienced problems when creating connections getting "The network type couldn't be detected. Contact can't be added." messages using PHP 7.4 (as the install instruction stated 7.1 or higher).
After downgrading to 7.1 it looked like connecting started to work well.

Right now I'm working on a new VPS for tupambae.org:

Friendica 'Giant Rhubarb' 2023.05 - 1518
PHP 8.2.10

(it's a beta testing of a hoster) but some how not everything works as expected.

I just tried to contact the public forum @Rugby from this profile here.
Over here, the contact is displayed as follows:

(Group) I follow them (#DFRN (via #ActivityPub))

but over there this profile doesn't show up.

No problems for now with establishing connections with mastodon profiles and I just tested a friendica 2021.01 profile and that worked to.

Should I downgrade the PHP version and if so to which one?

Also, I posted a help request to the helpers page about how to set up the forum pages properly as the don't work "as expected" but it doesn't look to me as if the post was received by the helpers forum: