24 February 2021

How big is small enough

Updated: May 5th, 2021

For a long time I've been interested in what makes and breaks communes. What is their legacy and whether or not it is sad that they seem to always grow, fail to scale and die out.

In this living post I am trying to investigate sizes of communities, activity within those and degree of moderation required. My current hypothesis is that for a community to thrive there should be a leader or a couple of leaders, who bear the idea. It doesn't mean authoritarism and doesn't imply governance at all, the role of leaders is to inspire and drive the activity by their own example. Then, there seem to be a need of having at least some activists beyond leaders themselves. In my experience, lack of said activists leads to communities folding when leaders have to let go for a little bit.

circumlunar.space

It seems to be fair to say that the most activity on circumlunar is happening on bulletin boards.

Activity

There is at least one alive message thread on BBS per day, but there are not much messages. As far as hacking is concerned, solderpunk seems to be the most active by far (not surprisingly). As of Feb 24 2020 I've started measuring active users on Soviet, but at the time of writing, there are surprisingly little users idling (me and another person, who's idling for 6 days).

On May 5th, I've figured out that there are `last` logs of this colony.

I didn't analyse the data, and also, I plan to collect more data points, but there's 20+ users, many of them connect more than once.

Bad actors (under various definitions of "bad")

There were approximately two times where circumlunar colonies had to part with its member out of approximately 150 users here.

trans-neptunian.space

After reaching out to littlejohn, I got some information about active visitors of his capsule at the time of him writing SMOG.

Here's what he has to say about the community around his work. There were around thirty people writing to him about SMOG. SMOG had three to four people who were writing every week, not only via E-Mail, but also over Mastodon.

"Bad" actors

As in circumlunar's case, the project author doesn't recognise any actors as those having malicious intent, nor does he categorise them as "bad actors".

Weird stuff

To me this seems like a harmless ARG white rabbit hook, but

BTW, I'm planning to find some time to crack the codes from this Numbers Station... I've already found the E-Mail of the person behind it and shot them a mail to confirm that it's solvable, but it seems like it is, based on the HTML metadata. I also am not too optimistic that they shall reply, but I'm fairly certain that they listen, so I guess it's going to be pleasant for them to know that someone is trying.

Politics

there was some irrelevant politics-related feedback.

social.doma.dev: self-hosted mastodon server

More stats are coming soon, but overall, since Mastodon is federated, there are federated bad actors. One or two of whom directly interacted with us, were banned and their servers de-federated. There is a total of four servers de-federated by us.

Another incident was due to a user creepily registering with us (and many many other Mastodon servers with open registration). Since their account was silent, we have disabled it and closed registration for a while, especially given confrontation of not-so-well-behaved gentlemen from the rest of the fediverse.