“without”: if you have no long-term durable identity, what role does feedback+reputation play? and what does this mean wrt safeguarding, community curation,.. can’t hand-wave these things away

Convener: fiore (mailto:fiore@dyad.berlin)

Website: https://dyad.berlin (sort of, more of the provocation and/or worked example than the topic)

Notes

Notes for posterity; session didn’t run (I beefed it with adding it to the agenda) leaving notes in case anyone wants to engage

FIORE:

• context: dyad, local (berlin) presence based social platform, based around a one-shot prompt-response-meeting-feedback* cycle
• the toolchain available to platform builders today (auth, analytics, mailing-list, billing, etc.) is shaped to serve platforms built around persistent identities that accumulate data over time
• AP and ATP address real issue in portability, but decentralize the operator whilst retaining the underlying retention-shaped ontology, eg. in their primitives (actors, posts, followers, feeds) . this is an uninformed opinion please come get me
• persistent actor identity is load-bearing for feed-shape platforms: you follow X, X’s activity stream accumulates, the platform indexes the relationship over time. drop the feed and the persistence of the actor stops being structural and starts being a leftover assumption (question mark?)
• so: once you release yourself from a platform ontology based around actors whose activity you follow, what actually still requires persistent actor identities? (see New Design Congress for a radical critique on digital identities (DID doesn’t get off scott free)
• the platforms we and others are building don’t share some/many/all of the predicates the existing toolchain assumes. or, could change into potentially interesting and beautiful new shapes were we to fundamentally question them..

Questions I had for the room/questions to sharpen to ask to other :

• how many “requirements” for persistent identity can we revisit when the platform isn’t feed-shaped/isn’t built for scale/is based around bounded time/locations? eg. sybil resistance, reputation continuity, account recovery, ‘sticky’ moderation
• what shapes/patterns/norms are enabled or foreclosed in social platforms built this way?
• what would an open protocol for gatherings (as opposed to publishing) look like?

adjacent work I’m learning from: Bonfire, Spritely, Mobilizon, Gancio, Smoke Signal, Acter, NDC, others? if you are involved in one of these, or otherwise just interested, please get in touch!