Ever since I created this instance, I wanted this corner of the fediverse to explore new radical ways to run online social media which attempts to tear down the built-in hierarchies of website hosting. The first step of this was the introduction of admin recalls a while ago, and when some of my co-admins approached me about also adding a piefed.dbzer0.com domain I saw an opportunity to attempt something I’ve been mulling on for a while: An Anarchist Confederation!

You see, the issue with running a social media, is that there’s always a hierarchy with one person or organization having “the keys to the kingdom”, whether this is the person with sudo access, or the one who bought the domain etc. This is an inescapable reality of website hosting we cannot get around (Yes, I’m aware of things like nostr etc, but those have ending issues that are beyond the scope of this post). So at the end, you always end up with some form of BDFL, or at best, a non-profit somewhere with an oligarchy of people controlling it.

The Fediverse system is a good-ish solution to that. We get to have social media without any one entity controlling the whole network, but we still have a ton of (beefing) kings and kingdoms instead. Places go down, places come up, people are not sure where to set up accounts and so on. And each of those fediverse instances still have that inherent hierarchy, so the members of say, lemmy.world, are still beholden to the actions of its admins, and their only option is to uproot their whole presence there and go elsewhere, without any safety that the next admin won’t cause them issues as well.

So I had the idea, what if we create one single entity, which is nevertheless still not controlled by any one person? When you join that entity, you still get to know what it stands for, and can choose any of the services it operates, but most of those services will be run by different people, so it’s not possible for one of them to go rogue or have a burnout and ruin the whole thing.

Ultimately, this approach is meant to protects you, from people like me, pre-emptively.

So when the idea was floated of running an anarchist piefed along with /0, I suggested this concept to the other admins, who happily agreed to give it a try. This had the added benefit of not adding yet more website hosting overhead to myself and to also give a more stable stake to the admins who did the hosting job. Now not only do the admins of anarchist.nexus have the piefed instance they wanted, but they have the extra safety of me not being able to ruin the whole thing by having a burnout/meltdown/stroke or being arrested/disappeared etc.

But the point is not merely to have yet another fediverse instance. The idea here is that we’re much more tightly woven together, which further increases the social costs of someone going rogue, as well as strengthens the bonds of all the people involved, making us stronger as a team. What does this mean in practice? All the Flotilla members agree to the following:

Same Rules

This means that all instances in the flotilla follow the same rules, including those voted by our combined community. This means that whether you’re part of lemmy.dbzer0.com or anarchist.nexus, we’re still following the same code of conduct, we have the same rules like admin recalls, disengage and so on. You can choose your flavor or software, without having to worry about re-learning new rules or admin idiosyncrasies.

Same staff

The Flotilla is built around the idea of sharing workloads. So the members of the instances agree to have admins and sysadmins which can float between them. This is not only meant to strengthen the common control, but also the trust and finally to only require one announcement for new admins, instead of having to have different admin onboarding/recalls per service.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that each admin/sysadmin will be active in all instances. For example I don’t have the time to be actively involved in anarchist.nexus atm, but I could easily do so if I found it. This creates a much easier way to spread our abilities according to our needs. People who have more capacity, can smoothly go to help in more instances, while those overwhelmed can dedicate themselves to fewer. We hope this both reduces the chance of burnout and gives flotilla members greater flexibility, by being able to use their preferred fediverse software, while staying within a community they helped build-up.

Common Governance

As a natural extension of those two concepts above. The instances will have a shared governance system. This means we will have a common governance community and voting structure. All validated members of the flotilla will be able to vote in governance threads with the same restrictions as we have now.

Likewise, all instances will have a normalized defederation list, which will be handled by following each other’s censures on the fediseer, and all bans will be also common from the instances as well. So the flotilla decides person A is not welcome, they’re not welcome in all our fleet!

The anarchist.nexus is hopefully just the first instance in our fleet (all kudos go to @[email protected] and @[email protected]) and a proof-of-concept for the whole attempt. If this goes well, we may be able to extend to other software in the future.

As with everything novel, there’s bound to be teething issues we’re going to encounter, but we’re commited to figuring it out with all of you.

And of course, go and join https://anarchist.nexus/ if that’s more your speed!