ActivityPub and ATProto both promise to rebuild social life online, but they answer the question of where community actually forms in fundamentally different ways. Protocol design is institutional design, and right now those institutions are being built.

ActivityPub and ATProto both promise to rebuild social life online, but they answer the question of where community actually forms in fundamentally different ways. Protocol design is institutional design, and right now those institutions are being built.

  • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    An ActivityPub server-as-community has sanctions but lacks the prior steps: rules aren’t visible to outsiders and monitoring is purely reactive,

    Compare this to Reddit, where arriving at a subreddit immediately presents the community’s identity as a first-class interface element: its name, description, rules, moderators, visual identity. The community is a navigable object that you can encounter, evaluate, and choose to join.

    Lemmy communities are no different from subreddits in having a sidebar with rules and moderator lists; they even go a step further in making modlogs public. The way the article is written makes it seem like the author didn’t actually test the software they wrote about.