Groups and autonomous spaces: a mental model for better social networks

A better economic model can incentivize contribution and sustain decentralized social networks, but it alone cannot convince users to join a new application and stay. Instead, applications need to enable valuable experiences lacking in existing options.

Most existing social media see us as atomized individuals, with algorithms controlling what we see and how we are seen. We make thousands or even more connections with others, few of them meaningful, while our behavior in those connections is mediated and policed by platform policy.

In real life, we are only able to maintain stable social connections with around 150 people, a mental capacity that has not evolved with social media. Those social connections are situated in different communities, with different social norms and contexts in which we participate. It is also these close-knit, participatory, and obviously self-governing groups that in turn foster new meaningful connections.

If a digital space can facilitate groups like this, it not only offers deep connections to people who stay but also becomes much more interesting for people to visit. A neighborhood filled with speakeasy bars, local bookstores, half-hidden concerts, and house parties is much more alluring than a shopping mall that is convenient and standard, where diverse and small semi-public spaces sustain existing friendships and introduce newcomers at the same time.

Such digital space also creates a positive impact on the society that adopts it. The political polarization raised by social media has been attributed to the “echo chambers effect”, in which we are fed information that aligns with our biases. However recent studies have found that online interactions expose us to more diverse viewpoints, and it is precisely encountering views that are drastically different and out-of-context that reaffirm our existing biases. When interaction happens mostly in groups, a higher diversity can be maintained across groups, while we can interact with each other in a way that is more cohesive and more personal.

When users have to publish through group identity, the peer pressure and peer support within groups could encourage honesty and integrity in posting. Banning or subscribing is also more effective when dealing with groups instead of individual users. If the group membership is granted offline, it can be used for proof of personhood in a privacy-preserving way, which can be then used to mitigate Sybil attacks and fake news.

People have been building digital spaces for self-organizing groups, but it seems that the decentralized nature of such a community dynamic would clash with the centralized infrastructure.

One example is Reddit. It has maintained steady growth across the years, is able to foster in-depth discussions, and is planning for its IPO. Last June the company decided to raise its price for API access, effectively eliminating many popular 3rd party applications. As a protest, over 8,000 subreddits participated in a blackout, only resulting in Reddit taking back control by removing or threatening to remove moderators. Users are only left with the realization that the communities they created and maintained don’t really belong to them.

Right after the blackout event, Reddit brought back r/place, the popular collective pixel board. As protests, angry users spelled out “Fuck Spec”, the user name of Reddit CEO, in many different versions and languages. Ironically, r/place 2023 was hugely successful, bringing Reddit user growth and mobile app downloads. The marvelous coordination among global communities is no match to the authority of a centralized infrastructure.

Another example, well known among Chinese-speaking users, is Douban, where users can create their own Douban Group. Its self-governing and chaotic nature makes it ideal for forming communities on common interests and obsessions, and it has become the soil for many cultural phenomena in China. However, its social impact became so big that the Chinese government decided to step in and apply stronger censorship. The slow process of lively communities being strangled to death is a painful reminder of why spaces for groups should be fundamentally autonomous.

Blockchain provides a chance to build such autonomous spaces, starting with DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) that have explored new forms of communities.

Autonomous spaces owned by users were possible, but before blockchain, they had limitations and were difficult to set up. Communities can attain autonomy using protocols such as ActivityPub and Matrix but with the cost of running and maintaining their own server. With blockchain, it is now possible to have a global identity and other properties such as reputation that allows users to easily move between different communities, and economic models that compensate the cost of resource providers.

It’s also quite likely that autonomous spaces are consciously sought by many. Mastodon instances number grew 5x after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, Lemmy instances number grew 20x after the Reddit blackout, and Discourse became one of the fastest-growing companies in 2023. On Matters Town, before we have the notion of community or group, we have seen numerous communities come together and take on lives of their own. Some turned into publishing groups, and many have their own Discourse or Discord instances.

Many questions are unclear, such as what these autonomous spaces look and feel like, what role should tokens play in the community, or how should users form groups. But DAO is already a great starting point to imagine the form of such a community, and for me, it will be one of the most exciting directions to explore.