Mu for democracy

I've been daily-driving mu since its release. There's a newfelt sense of agency in my online experience now, afforded to me by having an open social media client*¹ made by familiar people in my geographic region (EU), whose hosting services in Eurosky I'm also a beneficiary of.

As a small non-profit team that's building off of the stable foundations of the open Bluesky app, the mu crew can more freely experiment with daring new features, ranging from the low-key radical (edits!) to whimsical delights 🐈

Authentic social media

As playfully as mu presents itself, it's a serious project; Eurosky and its parent foundation Modal takes digital democratization very seriously.

The clearest assertion of the democratic agenda in mu appears in its Trusted Verifier Program, pushing forward an urgently needed web-of-trust.

Thinking more about what a social media experience made for social cohesion could look like, I was reminded of a paper by E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang and others*² called Community by Design, subsequently published as a more easily digestible article.

It centers around the concept of social bridging, a way of interconnecting and ranking content for the purpose of bridging social divides as opposed to exacerbating them for the purpose of outrage and clicks.

Audrey Tang frames this as discovering our 'uncommon ground'.

“Plurality is about a diffusion of diverse viewpoints. Through technology, we have a way to discover our uncommon ground so that even though we come from different places, there’s a systemic way to co-create policies and norms,” Tang said. By “uncommon ground,” she means those rare points of agreement that people with very different ideological views often don’t realise they share — values that can be uncovered through deep listening and mutual understanding, creating space to move beyond polarisation.

An aside on advertising

The 'Community by Design' paper outlines several prospective interventions, including a complete overhaul of the advertising business model with the aim of putting those ad dollars in service of social cohesion.

While I'd personally like to leave most forms of advertising behind us as we move on to a new and better web, @robin.berjon.com & friends in the Modal foundation happen to be among the very few people who could get it right.

That said, I don't think we're ready for that discussion yet, as its largely contingent on whatever Bluesky decides to do first with its 99% market share of the Atmosphere's attention economy. There's no meaningful leverage there for smaller players until the collective pie has grown by an order of magnitude.

Community Notes

The lowest-hanging fruit bridge available to us appears to be the community-powered sensemaking utility popularized on Twitter called Community Notes.

It pursues social bridging by means of contextualizing potentially misleading posts with crowd-sourced addendums. The system is not without its challenges, but no system of democratization ever is. It can only be improved by engaging with it.

What makes Community Notes such an easy win for the open social web is that most of the design work is already done by @jonathanwarden.com who's been "working on algorithms to make online conversations less toxic and more intelligent" for many, many years.

p.s. Jonathan, here are some suggestions of conceptual bridging illustrations made by accredited artists*³ <3

The original Community Notes remains available as an open source repository with detailed documentation, but Jonathan has moved beyond that with his own specs and a prototype made specifically for the AT protocol.

• https://github.com/johnwarden/open-community-notes
• https://github.com/johnwarden/atproto-community-notes
• https://github.com/johnwarden/bluenotes

This work is right there, ready for adoption. Jonathan's working implementation has long remained sidelined for lack of a proper proving ground, as Bluesky doesn't appear sufficiently interested in this feature to trial it themselves.

Mu can be that proving ground, ideally in coordination with the likes of Blacksky. I'm therefore urging the Mu/Eurosky team to contact Jonathan in hopes that he'll be a willing collaborator.

That's my main case made, but here's a bonus.

Community Checks

A month ago Tobias Rose published a viral onepager called The Noisy Room.

It reminds us of a long known and well researched finding: the vast majority of toxic content on our social media feeds is created by a disproportionately loud minority of agitators.

As a mitigation tactic, Tobias suggests an offshoot of the Community Notes system called Community Checks.

This proposal also comes with open technical specifications and UI mockups. It's a less proven idea than the familiar Community Notes and would require more work to get it right, but it's a natural add-on to consider once the foundation is set with Community Notes.

On the horizon there are even more bridging features of reasonable scope*⁴ to be considered, like Semble's Connections and the pol.is-based people's assemblies by Blacksky, which might be further generalized by Agora*⁵.

But for a start Community Notes presents the path of least resistance for Mu to continue its budding democratization streak.

If you like this idea, the best way to make it happen is to financially support @eurosky.social