To repurpose what I was thinking of posting as an Nth-level comment, and leaving this long because I don't have time to shorten it (and because I'm trying to phrase it with so many preemption pieces that it won't immediately attract some kinds of detractors which I want to try to advance this argument beyond/around), yada yada:
Making it purely up to the individual to decide these things when they have to decide in a coordinated way or else connections break down results in unhappy situations. Right now, we have enough coordination anarchy in digital social networks that it leads to some combination of entrenchment, pseudorandomness, and fashion cycles (at least as far as I can see).
In the US, mail became a regulated monopoly, and the telephone network has regulation to try to give newcomers a better playing field and avoid capture effects (not that this always works—but things like “in this metro area, all ten digits must always be dialed so that the new numbers being introduced don't become the lower-class numbers that everyone fights to avoid anyway” have happened). Structure and usage regulations for physical shared community spaces have enough difference in focus and constraints that they don't seem to get applied the same way, and the localization and nature of enforcement mean they don't have the same kind of massive leverage. It is my strong suspicion that the lack of a single consensus “physics” in shared digital spaces (and attendant shared approach/instinct; cultural differences and training aside, human bodies have substantially similar baseline physical capabilities and constraints across the world) means that even with arbitrarily “benevolent” (whatever that means) government intervention, the idea of a level field doesn't work the same way to start with, and there's a panoply of little technical decisions that have “already been made” that combine to make things amazingly awkward on that level as well.
We've tried “just stop using it!” since Stallman started saying it ages ago, and it doesn't work in practice for a lot of people (“because not everyone does it!” is of course the exact coordination problem I'm calling out above). Regulation seems almost untenable from this position, at least assuming pace-of-advancement continues to be a serious concern and expectations haven't globally converged, though I wouldn't be surprised if some particularly fluid kind of regulation popped up (especially from the European sphere) that would break logjams better. What else can usefully be tried if we don't want to wind up in the Big Social hegemony world?
One that I rarely see is “capitulate in an accelerationist manner, let them become governments, and then push to make them good ones”—interesting as a thought experiment, but I wouldn't want to try to put that in practice from here. Can we extract useful information from that, though?
A related observation: to some extent, the success of Mastodon (within several communities I'm part of, enough so that I can use it as part of the primary “social network” set in the same way many people use Twitter and observe a lot of jumping ship there from Twitter along the way, even though in terms of absolute popularity it may still be far weaker) mimics what's been called the Amish-congregation government model to me (you are heavily bound by your choice of instance but it generally remains practical to switch), and instance leaders seem to be taking a much more active and community-centered role than Big Social allows. But that's still ultimately based enough on the Twitter model of interaction that there are lingering social problems (at least I find them to be problems) from that, and the currents of code changes are still a coordination/effort problem of their own, though that's partly mitigated by several instances running interesting forks already while leaving interoperability intact. I'll be very curious to see how that evolves.
Making it purely up to the individual to decide these things when they have to decide in a coordinated way or else connections break down results in unhappy situations. Right now, we have enough coordination anarchy in digital social networks that it leads to some combination of entrenchment, pseudorandomness, and fashion cycles (at least as far as I can see).
In the US, mail became a regulated monopoly, and the telephone network has regulation to try to give newcomers a better playing field and avoid capture effects (not that this always works—but things like “in this metro area, all ten digits must always be dialed so that the new numbers being introduced don't become the lower-class numbers that everyone fights to avoid anyway” have happened). Structure and usage regulations for physical shared community spaces have enough difference in focus and constraints that they don't seem to get applied the same way, and the localization and nature of enforcement mean they don't have the same kind of massive leverage. It is my strong suspicion that the lack of a single consensus “physics” in shared digital spaces (and attendant shared approach/instinct; cultural differences and training aside, human bodies have substantially similar baseline physical capabilities and constraints across the world) means that even with arbitrarily “benevolent” (whatever that means) government intervention, the idea of a level field doesn't work the same way to start with, and there's a panoply of little technical decisions that have “already been made” that combine to make things amazingly awkward on that level as well.
We've tried “just stop using it!” since Stallman started saying it ages ago, and it doesn't work in practice for a lot of people (“because not everyone does it!” is of course the exact coordination problem I'm calling out above). Regulation seems almost untenable from this position, at least assuming pace-of-advancement continues to be a serious concern and expectations haven't globally converged, though I wouldn't be surprised if some particularly fluid kind of regulation popped up (especially from the European sphere) that would break logjams better. What else can usefully be tried if we don't want to wind up in the Big Social hegemony world?
One that I rarely see is “capitulate in an accelerationist manner, let them become governments, and then push to make them good ones”—interesting as a thought experiment, but I wouldn't want to try to put that in practice from here. Can we extract useful information from that, though?
A related observation: to some extent, the success of Mastodon (within several communities I'm part of, enough so that I can use it as part of the primary “social network” set in the same way many people use Twitter and observe a lot of jumping ship there from Twitter along the way, even though in terms of absolute popularity it may still be far weaker) mimics what's been called the Amish-congregation government model to me (you are heavily bound by your choice of instance but it generally remains practical to switch), and instance leaders seem to be taking a much more active and community-centered role than Big Social allows. But that's still ultimately based enough on the Twitter model of interaction that there are lingering social problems (at least I find them to be problems) from that, and the currents of code changes are still a coordination/effort problem of their own, though that's partly mitigated by several instances running interesting forks already while leaving interoperability intact. I'll be very curious to see how that evolves.