The former seems to be where the meta decisions are going, but the latter is what I instinctively anchored on when I heard the word archipelago.
Gotcha. There’s a different phrase we’d tossed around a bit which was “Private Fiefdoms”, which I think has more of the connotations of what the currently implementation is pointed towards.
But, the longterm goal is (most likely – plans can change a bunch in the meantime) more like a genuine archipelago where people with shared conversational goals/norms have banded together. Subreddits or what-have-you. It’s just that for the immediate future, it’s unclear what sort of islands we might coalesce into, or who trusts who to run an island.
Some random bits of my worldview here:
I think it is necessary to have a leader or small trusted council run an island.
If an island is named after a topic, that means anyone else who wants to run a space around that topic but optimized around different norms has to fight over the namespace.
A lot of what I’m trying to do is sidestep fights over overton windows. A subreddit still creates a venue to fight over, if people have subtle or not-so-subtle differences of opinion on what’s good. A newly created subreddit might created a power vacuum for people to fight over. Starting with “users-fiefdoms” first lets people get a sense of who they trust, and who they might want to join forces with to start a council.
I think if there end up being a few dominant modes of discussion, it’ll be easier to express a given user’s space as “X Norms, but with this small diff”.
Gotcha. There’s a different phrase we’d tossed around a bit which was “Private Fiefdoms”, which I think has more of the connotations of what the currently implementation is pointed towards.
But, the longterm goal is (most likely – plans can change a bunch in the meantime) more like a genuine archipelago where people with shared conversational goals/norms have banded together. Subreddits or what-have-you. It’s just that for the immediate future, it’s unclear what sort of islands we might coalesce into, or who trusts who to run an island.
Some random bits of my worldview here:
I think it is necessary to have a leader or small trusted council run an island.
If an island is named after a topic, that means anyone else who wants to run a space around that topic but optimized around different norms has to fight over the namespace.
A lot of what I’m trying to do is sidestep fights over overton windows. A subreddit still creates a venue to fight over, if people have subtle or not-so-subtle differences of opinion on what’s good. A newly created subreddit might created a power vacuum for people to fight over. Starting with “users-fiefdoms” first lets people get a sense of who they trust, and who they might want to join forces with to start a council.
I think if there end up being a few dominant modes of discussion, it’ll be easier to express a given user’s space as “X Norms, but with this small diff”.