Composable Trust

"We guarantee that users aren’t subject to platforms. Yet communities are still subject to their stewards. Can we fix this?" asks this brilliant 4-part series, which I'm Hubbing in one post as I await part 4.

Part 1 basically sets out the problem: today's online communities resemble platforms, in that the community's stewards (OCMs) determine everything, there is no credible exit if they close of get enshittified, etc.

In particular, the stewards "decide who belongs, what the community space looks like, and who gets removed. These are different decisions, with different stakes ... Yet, because there is no infrastructure to separate them, they fuse into a single point of failure."

atproto solves the platform problem - the author does a great job of explaining how: "The architecture guarantees that alternatives can emerge because every part of the system can be run by competing providers. This is credible exit... at every level, the protocol provides surfaces on which competition can happen." Can something analogous emerge for communities?

In Part 2, we see how tp separate two separate questions: “Who belongs?”, and “What does belonging look like in this context?”. The first is "a high-stakes, slow changing, and infrequent decision", while the second is just a moderation decision, something stewards have to do all the time. But "The more decisions a steward makes, the more surfaces exist for trust to erode... we need ... governance that stop making one operator monolithically govern everything."

Using composable moderation as a template, proposes:

• "a Roster — issues credentials. It defines the community, decides who meets the community’s criteria, and manages vetting...
• a Venue — is any service that scopes to and interprets the Roster’s credentials. It governs its own service’s context, and decides if, how, and when to interpret the Roster’s credentials...

Both have bounded authority over their own domain and no authority over the other’s... This separation makes competition structurally possible at both layers, and can yield a competition surface for Venues specifically... [but it] can only work if the credential — the thing that flows from the issuer to the service — can survive independently", which brings us to...

Part 3... tbc