Hey reticulum community,

I want us to learn from the issues of the clearnet.
Not to distance us further but to help create communities.

Background

I was at a local meeting today, where people from rural places visited and shared all their problems. And I know of no way to help them where I live...

I always thought about if technology can really helps us with social life, or hinders it. Like as the clearnet is right now I am seeing all this pain and basically no benefits our digital lifes have created.
I myself think that global connection can be most useful if it's used locally. And I don't mean nations or borders, but people we know, life situations, climates etc. all these things bond us in a way.

I hope that maybe even rural areas can benefit from such a network to help kickstart resistant and independent communities...

Guidelines/Spitballing

• All people welcome no matter their believe

  trying to find common ground rather than distinction
  especially for communities where informal exchange could happen even if fully unrelated to this one doesn't agree on different topics

• Communities can choose their criteria for joining/membership

• Communities can choose their criteria for topics/common ground example:

  • climate, (e.g. for farming)
  • distance, (e.g. for irl meetings, could be community sets radius and client and then they meet)
  • global (e.g. for global warming, tech)

• Power distribution
  Aiming towards systems where neither a minority nor a majority gets to rule, would be very cool i think.
  For example not the page owner gets to decide. Not the community has rights to say how everything must be done. And not even the maturity of a community. But systems that help everyone get a word and have the power to say criticize, discuses and change is in my eyes very important. As communities, and as individuals.

Problems/ Worries

• Form factor

I'm not sure which form factor allows for both informant and accessible.
For example blogs/articles are informant but cost of participation entry is high.
Forums are more accessible but less informant and hard to filter through.

• Not creating a platform
  While everyone should be welcome, I wouldn't want a minority or majority to have a platform to have power over the life and decisions of others. I don't want to completely refrain from politic action, but am ensure of what participation system should be in place to not let such things happen.

• Accessibility and Relevancy
  The question here is how can you bridge accessibility and relevancy with the interests of communities. How can you ensure that the system doesn't get flooded with little communities making it inaccessible or irrelevant for the majority. (like reddit)

This was written in a hurry I hope I'm still able to create discussion, really anything is welcome!

My two cents on this is that the reason the clearnet has gotten as rough as it is has is that the upkeep and effort required to keep up a server, keep up with the latest security issues, make backups, whatever, is way too high for most people to ever justify, even for a nerdy kid to set up in his free time for his local community. That and the fact most people just don't have computer in the first place and it's hard to discovery if a local community has been made. People head to conglomerate websites like reddit because it's a million times more convenient than doing anything else (and they are boosted up in google's search results but that's a different issue), and that's created a positive feedback loop where now those sites are the first things people check before the rest of the web.

The closest things that solve those issues is maybe git or hyphanet, but really technically difficult to the average person to even understand nevermind set up. If you could make a system like that, for example setting up a forum, which you could set up on your phone in 10 minutes and then have it be copied peer to peer so that one device being destroyed can't delete the whole system (and so the forum is always online as long as someone has their phone working) and have some fancy way of making it all sync and just have that work without too much effort (group destination in reticulum, eventually when they get added), then that fits your criteria

I don't think the power distribution model is that necessary btw, too much bureaucracy solved digitally for local communities that could solve it face to face, and anyways I think just healthy competition where someone could just fork the whole thing in 5 minutes is enough of a deterrent that someone being the sole admin could be fine.

welo: thanks for the comment appreciate it

Well I would like this place to be more than just tech and git. And I think while distribution system and git are great, I'd also love for a place to exist where people come together without creating their own individual website.
Moving away from hyper-individualization to trying to figure out how to work with communities. What information to share with trusted peers, and trusted relationships over the network. And coming together in real life locally.

I don't think the power distribution model is that necessary btw, too much bureaucracy solved digitally for local communities that could solve it face to face, and anyways I think just healthy competition where someone could just fork the whole thing in 5 minutes is enough of a deterrent that someone being the sole admin could be fine.

true its more of a personal kink x) , i think not all issues might be able to get solved face to face though, so thinking about some system to make this project resilient and long living is not a bad idea imo.

I mean taking rural places as example:

are they really going to build their own website? I think their more inclined to inform themselves about other global communities with a similar climate zone on what plants they plant there, or out of what materials they build their houses etc.

Or in a war zone, you really don't want to make a website there LMAO, more likely do you want to inform yourself about survival strategies of people in regions that are or have been through that.

Theoretically would a basic group chat (+ customization, permissions, thread, file downloads and some static pages) do the job here, because that wouldn't be too challenging to make as a distributed system that could also potentially work offline as well. The simpler you can make the solution the better I think.

You'd have backups by default with LXMF propagation nodes by default, easy enough to set up potentially and so on. It's not Turing complete but maybe that's not necessary here. Most people live fine with 10 year old whatapp group chats, give them some extra abilities and features and maybe that would be perfectly fine.

reminded of https://matrix.org/ for the bridging aspect.

Reading this thread, I noticed that the conversation around community engagement does not have things like invites and calendar sharing at the main focus of this method. 80-90% of the things people use clearnet for are events to organize and enjoy with each other. A lot of people still rely on facebook groups on the clearnet, with time as the main benefactor in holding community.

RNS has the building blocks to do just this. Saw someone on github who created a micron concept that I am trying to implement to see its utility (and see if it works over LoRa).

The github is: https://github.com/Nezugi/Off-Grid-Community-Suite

@Loelin I'm using this already for my LoRa network, I slimmed the main page down to make it load faster. The only thing I couldn't get working was the Calendar but other than that it works fine over LoRa.
I like the idea of using Reticulum for small communities in everyday tasks but especially in emergency situations.

Welo: thats not really what i envision

I'd love to expirement perosnally i dont think what we have settled on works well

Right now I'm learning rust and hope to make a WIP project so you can maybe get a better idea

But honestly I'd also love to discuess design philosophies in detail

But implementation and what exists is def worth looking into :)

Oh- handling emergency situations might be another interesting topic in itself

I love the discussion and focus of the OP. In my experience "one thing fits all" types of solutions are not possible if are mindful of concentration of power. If community is not able to adapt your solution to their needs - this creates an unequal distribution of power. And this is one of major sources of all kinds of trouble in clearnet. How can we make things, that are easily adopted to the needs of specific groups of people, resistant to any type of capture?