Comment by webwanderings

>It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes.

This is the noble savage myth of the internet. Humans do fine in large groups, as evidenced by the fact that I assume nobody posting here currently lives in a tribe of 150 people. If scaling wasn't in our nature we'd probably do less of it. It's precisely one of the few things unique to our nature. As Stafford Beer said, the purpose of a system is what it does.

The problem on the internet isn't the scale, it's that social networks aren't actually social, they're just networks. What makes large groups of people successful is a social contract, common rules, values and narratives, myths. Every "social" media platform is just a glorified train station. It's not social media, just media. To this day I haven't seen one online community that say, has given itself a constitution and a form of governance.

There's two ways to solve this, none of them are reverting to some sort of paleo-internet. The first is to reappropriate the internet back into existing structures, which is happening in a lot of places as nations start to enforce existing borders and the internet just becomes part of the existing social infrastructure, another interesting one would be internet-native states, network states is a term thrown around, by somewhat cringy business gurus unfortunately.

The "continuous wars" is a weird comment. Unless you mean internet flame wars, because if "globalization" subsides real wars will happen more often. We kind of see it already as more and more people start leaning right heavily. Small communities breed radicalization.

They can have a positive impact, but only if you can choose one from a global network of said communities as an adult and you don't treat it very seriously (you leave when it becomes toxic). As a person born in a small village community... let's say I don't miss a single fucking thing.

I think you can put the point to even the least tech savvy that the group chat is maybe the best iteration of the social internet. Because the groups are small, self moderated and independent. I guess the irony is that it relies on tech is/was provided by mobile phones already. Maybe all the more important that we don't allow texting to be wholly absorbed or replaced by closed messaging apps.

This makes a lot of sense to me. As an individual, how do I help move along the transition to smaller communities?

The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?

The entire point of the internet is connecting small communities into one large community - this allows the sharing of information at literal light speed across huge distances.

> If psychologists and anthropologists were techies and influencers of early Internet, we wouldn't have built such experiences in the first place.

How would they have done anything differently? The social part of the internet also started out as (very) small communities. They still exist, too, but are relatively niche and certainly less active then they were before.

> did anyone care to throw Ads on the old fashioned telephone lines

Certainly, that is what call center robot calls trying to sell unwanted stuff are all about.

> Or tag an Ad inside our snail mail?

Certainly, it comes on stamps.

I think this is why I enjoy Mastodon at the moment. Not so many people, and self-selecting geeks.

If it gets popular I'll have to look at blocking all the popular non-geeky instances ;)

Furthermore, while human nature is relatively stable, the technology has increased in every way.

The Edenic simplicity of HTTP has been supplanted by TLS and tracking goop and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!