Stephen Downes

This is a really good article that offers a lot of room for thought. It addresses a common fault of decentralized social network protocols like ActivityPub, ATmosphere and Matrix: they are silent on how the communities that use them ought to be governed. This "did not produce a neutral outcome but a highly specific one: the concentration of power in the hands of actors... its beneficiaries were predictable: whichever actors had the resources to build in the space the protocols left ungoverned." I don't think it's that simple; different protocols leave different (and differently-sized) ungoverned spaces to be exploited, and different (and differently-sized) common pool resources to be owned. I wish the had lingered longer on Elinor Ostrom's design principles for the governance of these common-pool resources. "Ostrom's central finding was that communities can successfully govern shared resources without either privatization or central authority." We need to talk more about this. And also about what it means to say a protocol creates (or requires) common pool resources. Image: Ashley Hodgson.