For example, for me, here are some things I wish to see (or would implement in my design) :
- design around ease of self-hosting. A non technical user must be able to self host easily and at a very low cost.
- Embrace content sorting and filtering algorithms, but on the client side, with optional control by the user.
- Standardize tags on all content. So many of the different ways different platforms classify or organize content can be implemented as tags, which increases interoperability between them.
- Abandon obsession with real-time-first implementations for use cases that don’t explicitly need it.
- Transferable user identity (between instances)
- User identity and authentication as separate service from social network instance
Would love to hear yours!
What exactly would be controlled differently under this direct democracy?
I think the most obvious one is moderation. What gets deleted, who gets kicked out. Then for example community rules, what’s the topic and rules of discussion. Every user/member could have a say in that. Maybe we could do some more structural and organizational decisions.
It gets a bit tricky with technology. Ideally we could do things like democratically decide to have a voice chat (if that’s what people want) and somehow 3 months later the platform has a voice chat… But it’s not that easy, software development doesn’t work this way.