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Communities are not fungible

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: Communities are not fungible

#31

Post by goodpoint »

ckardaris wrote: post #18
Asooka wrote: post #15

[flagged]

I don't think the article proposes that a community should not accept new members. On the contrary, it critiques the breaking of communities. Migrants or refugees have to find a new community because their old one was broken for whatever reason, be it war, financial troubles or something else. So in that case, that first breakage of community should have been prevented and the community preserved.

If anything it's well known that migrants tend to build communities as well as high-skills "expats".

Re: Communities are not fungible

#32

Post by chrisvalleybay »

kristoff_it wrote: post #22

This the strongest argument against building a community on top of proprietary services, especially if's a startup / VC money is involved. It's guaranteed to enshittify / sell out to a big company, and your community will crumble. That being said, I am guilty of helping building Zig communities on Discord, but in my defense none (literally none) of the FOSS alternatives was good enough at the time. And I'm also not r…

Campfire by 37Signals [0] might be interesting to you. This can also serve as a foundation to add your own features on top of.

[0] https://once.com/campfire

Re: Communities are not fungible

#33

Post by ziml77 »

DocTomoe wrote: post #8
testdelacc1 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a city that consistently builds about 3-4% of the number of homes we need to build each year. We don’t build rail, we don’t electricity transmission infrastructure, all of which increases our cost of living. NIMBYs are doing great, I’d say.

That would imply that 96-97% of population growth in your city immediately becomes homeless. Obviously, that is not the case.

No it doesn't. The number would be the percentage of additional housing needed. Existing housing doesn't suddenly disappear each year.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#34

Post by testdelacc1 »

DocTomoe wrote: post #11
testdelacc1 wrote: post #4

I agree with Joan here, communities aren’t fungible. Building something where something already exists does carry a cost. But I can also see how this will be used as one more arrow in the quiver of NIMBYs. In addition to environmental, economic, political reasons not to build something, also consider the cost to potentially breaking existing community bonds. We shouldn’t build new high density housing because the new…

If you are in America, that 'empty land' was not 'empty land'. It was Native land. Displacement of Native Americans was genocidal and destroyed communities and cultures. Also, the article touches Moses, right, but it is about communities as a concept, with a heavy emphasis on online communities, where 'new things to buy' do not come at the expense of 'tearing down the old' - and where, when you tear down the old, beh…

You will be pleased to know that I’m not from America, nor have I ever lived there.

My point stands: there are a million excuses not to build more. And when we make that choice not to build, the costs are invisible but they definitely exist. But hypothetical benefits are not as easy to point to as the costs of building.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#35

Post by jpereira »

When thinking about online communities I think the lack of "global" identities has dramatically hampered community migration and evolution. I fully agree with the author that you can't just pick up and move a community wholesale but irl we do see patterns of migration, disaporas, etc that bring along with them relationships and trust networks. That's been basically impossible to do online. The networks where most of us hang out are even straightforwardly antagonistic towards people leaving and maintaining their identities and relationships in anyway.

I don't quite know how to articulate it but I really feel the social fabric of the internet has been limited hugely by this, and it's hard to seperate what is fundamental about community migration with what's an outcome of this limited circumstance.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#36

Post by Esn024 »

testdelacc1 wrote: post #4

I agree with Joan here, communities aren’t fungible. Building something where something already exists does carry a cost. But I can also see how this will be used as one more arrow in the quiver of NIMBYs. In addition to environmental, economic, political reasons not to build something, also consider the cost to potentially breaking existing community bonds. We shouldn’t build new high density housing because the new…

I think, unlike what the author writes, communities CAN be moved if they are sufficiently small and loyal to the leaders who do the move, and the leaders don't screw it up. Moreover, the move is sometimes an improvement.

I've witnessed it myself. For example, Commander Keen fans moving from various InsideTheWeb forums to a centralized phpBB following the ITW shutdown announcement in the late 1990s. I can't think of anybody that got lost, and it was actually an improvement because the new discussion infrastructure was better than it had been before. The community didn't scatter to the winds, far from it; it consolidated and grew.

Of course, such a situation is probably rarer with the enshittification these days, but it would be worth it to figure out when it works, too.

And history is replete with stories of groups who became most successful AFTER a migration, or at least were not so negatively affected by one.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#37

Post by FranklinJabar »

energy123 wrote: post #23
FranklinJabar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Owning land. Whoever came up with this idea needs to be hung and revived a million times, and then tortured to death a million more. Our society has been mutilated as a result. I think you could ascribe this to either NIMBY or YIMBY harebrained thinking. We need a third option that's pro-human. We need public fucking housing.

There is no trade-off or contradiction between public housing and YIMBY deregulation to allow more private development. I want both. They are complementary. There's also overlap between YIMBYs are Georgists, they share some skepticism around private land ownership.

> There is no trade-off or contradiction between public housing and YIMBY deregulation

Sucking off developers removes all air from the room.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#38

Post by FranklinJabar »

roenxi wrote: post #20
FranklinJabar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Owning land. Whoever came up with this idea needs to be hung and revived a million times, and then tortured to death a million more. Our society has been mutilated as a result. I think you could ascribe this to either NIMBY or YIMBY harebrained thinking. We need a third option that's pro-human. We need public fucking housing.

You seem fairly keen on building public housing. Wouldn't that qualify you as a YIMBY? The YIMBYs are the lobby that tends to be pro-new-buildings. If you want to build public housing, only the NIMBYs would really oppose the idea.

> Wouldn't that qualify you as a YIMBY?

YIMBY is the pro-private-development lobby, as best I can tell. PHIMBY is the term I've seen.

> If you want to build public housing, only the NIMBYs would really oppose the idea.

I suspect most who go by YIMBY would also oppose this.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#40

Post by Nasrudith »

FranklinJabar wrote: post #13
JuniperMesos wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider to be anglo incompetence in dwelling construction that isn't NIMBYism?

Owning land. Whoever came up with this idea needs to be hung and revived a million times, and then tortured to death a million more. Our society has been mutilated as a result. I think you could ascribe this to either NIMBY or YIMBY harebrained thinking. We need a third option that's pro-human. We need public fucking housing.

We get it, you're a commie. No need to constantly repeat that you want public versions of everything that already exists.
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