@ntnsndr 95% prefer human management to rule-by-chatbot...who woulda thunk it? 馃く
Personally, it feels like we're doing alright with our committees of humans approach - an option oddly not represented on your poll. I'm surprised even 5% would want a DAO or an LLM to get involved.
Committees of humans FTW, but I think it is also telling that we are in a tiny minority, and control by founder or techie remains the norm.
@ntnsndr what do you think that is telling us?
I think it is because setting up a system like Social.coop requires a lot of effort, technical prowess, and patience. It's great for people who are deeply aligned with democratic practice. But for people more focused on other things, it's a high price to pay for founders to have less control in the end.
I think more widespread democratic practice online will require a) making starting up comparably easy to feudalism, and b) establishing norms that it is the right thing to do.
@GuerillaOntologist I just did a blog post trying to explain what I'm wrestling with, but I suspect it will still lean too heavily on the tech for your taste: https://nathanschneider.info/2026/02/constitutional-agents-for-online-governance/
@ntnsndr Mine and 95% of people's. We don't want DAOs, NFTs, or "AI Agents" in our tech, or in our orgs.
I don't see these technologies as fundamentally different from using incorporation statutes and contracts enforced by cops and prisons. But we've had this exchange before, and no need to rehash it.
Whatever the underlying technologies, I think we agree that our communities should seek to focus on the human skills and relationships, and let the underlying infrastructures only be an enabler of those.
@ntnsndr I took option 2 to mean something like: things of greater consequence could be formally signed off by more people, like defederating from a big instance, doing a system upgrade, appointing new admins/mods, etc. (Routine mod actions could still be done solo)
Sure, as long as there is a single server, rogue sysadmin still a threat - but it does not happen often. Let's push sysadmin further toward "titular" power. (i.e. option 2 can be DAO-less)
@ntnsndr point being: I read opt. 2 to mean _more_ human involvement than opt. 1.
@douginamug Yes, that's right! The idea there would be that a bot would manage voting systems, etc. So more participatory, potentially, than 1.
@ntnsndr ... and then there is secret sharing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing which - I think - could even democratize the server without external blockchains. Multiple "admins" with their own private key / secrets, you could predetermine how many are needed to take actions. You'd need a pretty smart, deterministic bot (pls no LLM) on the server, but should be possible 馃
(Does this exist already?)
