"The protocol world has been trying to solve the problem of how to leave, and the next step is working on how we can stay together."
It's not enough to be free. We also need to be in community
Link: The Pope on Defederation, by Laurens Hof in Connected Places
Laurens Hof provides some of the best and most important analysis of the open social web. This piece about the Pope’s Magnifica Humanitas encyclical is a standout.
“The dominant thinking that decentralisation is built upon has lots to say about the threats of concentrated power, but has little to say about social obligations. Cyber-libertarian tradition can tell you why no one should rule the network, but it cannot really tell you why the individual pieces should be together once it does.”
Pairing subsidiarity with solidarity is smart. The former is the liberartian-esque idea we know: that a larger entity should not affect the freedom of a smaller entity. But that’s where many projects end. Here, solidarity covers the social contract we all have with each other; something that pure libertarianism often pretends doesn’t or shouldn’t exist.
As Laurens notes:
“What is striking is that the two ecosystems struggle in opposite directions, where the fediverse has subsidiarity without solidarity, all autonomy and no way to govern the commons, and the atmosphere has solidarity without subsidiarity, a commons that almost no one shares responsibility for. The fediverse does not need more servers, it needs reasons for them to act like they owe each other something. The atmosphere does not need better tools, it has those, it needs the autonomy those tools enable to actually be taken up.”
His whole piece is very much worth your time, and his analysis on this space is unmissable.