Comment on Self Host to Local Communities
Rentlar@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Which brings me to the part we cannot skip, we have to evaluate every definition of a community against a simple test…
Can it be used to harm others, and can it be used to harm itself?
I don’t believe this is as simple of a test for the definition of community as the author makes out, without narrowing down from the numerous definitions of harm as well. Harm could be physical injury, it could be crimes and derogatory hate speech, but it could just as easily be defined as someone feeling uncomfortable, or not being given an opportunity to speak when they felt they deserved one.
To have a healthy community that can still withstand some inevitable episodes of dispute and drama that brew over time, two elements are required in my mental model:
- A community’s control and cohesiveness cannot fully depend on one entity, whose absence would cause the community to fall apart.
- People within the community have to accept to a certain degree, that people don’t think exactly the same as them on everything.
And so from my perspective, what that degree of acceptable difference is will help define what the harm to be avoided is or could be, in turn informing the test to define the community.
Shin@piefed.social 1 week ago
And I fully agree with you. And I’m the author of the text.
On the essay I needed a simple way to explain a “baseline”, something that can’t go below that. And I tried to move the reader to get that this isn’t a perfect solution, but a baseline. And I fully agree with you. Without a good definition of the kind of harm, measure of the harm (after all, harm is a simple term, but it does have weight), it’s hard to properly go there.
But my point was, baseline, we can’t go below this one. Even if a community considers “bad taste joke” as “no harm” while other community considers the other way around, it’s still possible for both communities to “exist”, wouldn’t co-exist, but would exist.
And since both don’t want to harm the other they would discuss up to some agreement on the kind and level of harm.
I understand you and to a certain degree I agree with you on the “no single person as ownership”, but when we need to make decision, it’s often a single person. On the federated it’s better, but my dream still runs on the fully cooperative communities. Which is a far dream in the current world stage.
Also,
This is pure poetry. I love it.
Ps.: Thanks for the reading and bringing the topic. And I think I should have done a better job on the definition of the harm too. A lesson learned.