Fractal localism for online communities
Realms
Only one realm is available in beta.
The ability to create new realms will be enabled when beta ends.
This is a project that attempts to improve how we scale online communities.
The goals are to:➊ Achieve fractal localism while keeping all the best parts of open & closed online communities.
➋ Create markets within communities and avoid ads as a funding mechanism.
➌ Eventually allow self-hosted, federated communities to join the universe.
Features currently implemented include:
- Nested channels, where each channel can be a full-fledged community with specific rules, hierarchies, reply threads & children channels. No limits on depth.
- Cross-tagging of other channels or threads, with back-links to follow discussions around the community.
- Contextual reputation models, with fully customizable permissions as a function of user roles, which are assigned by programmable rules based on reactions & opinions from other users.
- A map for discovering channels as an experiment to see how we relate to each other via location as our shared context.
- Self-governance via rules that can be changed through policy change proposals (a.k.a. motions) and votes. Children channel may inherit parent rules, or start new jurisdictions.
- Shareable curated feeds as aggregates of other channels & search filters, essentially functioning as personalized feed algorithms across multiple communities.
- Optional alt handles such that users can preserve privacy in different contexts, as channels allow.
- Decentralization by allowing cross-tagging across servers, based on standard authentication methods (somewhat of a cross between IRC & SMTP).
- Community monetization where valuable members of communities can monetize their contributions by requiring paid subscriptions for certain user roles, which can also help fund the project.
“Fractal means self-similarity; self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern”
— James Gleick