i love being on social.coop and i have learned so much from hanging out with all you nerds but the vibe here has been sort of off for a minute and i can't really put my finger on it. I don't have any more specifics for you now but I feel like we are reaching the point every coop reaches where things feel sort of adrift and we need a moment to recollect what the hell we're doing here
when I think about why this place is dope I think about @flancian who inspires me with worldbuilding and @edsu who has taught me a lot about patience and historical embeddings and @ntnsndr for teaching me about tactical cooperativism and @bhaugen whose initial replies to my posts of "wtf is this whole fediverse thing" kept me looking and @smallcircles for always being mad at the same things as me but in a more organized way and i just wish digital space had more of a "call in, pause shit" mode
that's not an exclusive list, i can @ like a dozen more people i have met through here i just don't want to be obnoxious. anyway i have been expressing this in the main matrix chat and haven't had the stomach to venture onto the loomio but i think one of the lessons i'm learning now is that digital cooperatives need an "all hands meeting" where it's possible to actually pause for consensus, because otherwise the fragmentation of time and space seems like it becomes too much to feel connected.
I am not trying to re-create analog cooperation in digital space, but i feel like there is shit to be learned yno. when we feel like the vibes need healing in meatspace cooperativism we pause to share and wait and i feel like that part of consensus is missing in digital cooperation
I have been hanging out on the other social networks too and one of the presiding modes of thought there is "i just want a place where i can post" and that doesn't match how i feel at all, but it's also been tough contributing time here because I have been trying to get our own sister instance off the ground with lessons learned from here and also I feel like in the last few big discussions we've had the vibes have gotten rotten and we don't have a good way of reeling that in.
instance scale is just about the furthest thing from a "goal" as i can imagine, and I wonder if this is a byproduct of fediverse-flavor federation where identity is bound up with instance, and if we wouldn't be better served with being part of many, smaller, overlapping groups instead. it's related to what i've been saying in the main chat about how the thing that we really seem to be needing is a collective reflection on values and if we come to irreconcilable differences to split up.
the anarchist in my bloodstream wants to find a way to enact the many small overlapping affinity group model where we can disperse and re-engage fluidly as the situation demands and maybe it's just feeling stuck where the structural model is to grow big and homogenous to be stable
@jonny I'd be curious to hear what you think of the ideas in https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/2023/06/19/groups-should-go-small/ -- in particular the idea in the last section, which I think would provide the "small overlapping affinity group" approach.
(If it's too terse, happy to expand on it.)