Decent Imaginaries

The whole point of building an open, democratic system is that we all own it — which also means that we can decide to pick up things to work on. If enough of us want something, we can assemble interested parties, have people bring requirements, sketch out details, and implement. (View Highlight)

the first step towards making decent futures a reality is to acknowledge that, while decentralisation is a political project and seeks to benefit everyone, very few people will come and stay on your system just because they believe that your software practices or protocol architecture are ideologically correct. (View Highlight)

users are smart and they've been fooled before: they need evidence that it's not just an improvement in your head. For decent to prevail, it has to be better, it has to be better on people's own terms, and it has to show it's better, not tell. (View Highlight)

Decentralisation isn't a property of your software or protocol, it's a measure of how much the people who use and are affected by a system can have agency over it — and that agency has to be reflected at lower layers too. (View Highlight)