If the town where you live was more like the internet, there would be one large department store where hundreds of vendors, all selling more-or-less the same things, would all be yelling at once while waving long lists of customer ratings to persuade you to buy from them. When you go through to pay, the department store - whose employees you never see - would extract anywhere between 30% to 70% of the price as their cut before passing the rest onto the vendor.
There would be no charismatic little streets with cafes spilling onto the pavement, or the bustle of people chatting, laughing and living. Instead, what you'd have is commerce stripped to its essence, "red in tooth and claw".
The challenge for any community recovering from this centralisation is how difficult it is change behaviours when there is no - seeming - compelling reason to do so. Unless something dramatic happens.
In 2020, with COVID, many of us got to experience that change. Amidst the pain, we also experienced a liberation of community. Restaurants spilling onto pavements. Shopping close to home. Living in community. And we liked it. Since then our battle between the Commute and the Community has become polarising and heated.
Gradually, perhaps imperceptibly, this battle has also been coming to the internet through federated, interoperable social media like Mastodon, BlueSky and their ilk. Hop Sauna, my 2025 Ambassadorship, is intended to push this further into the commercial space, recovering our online economic communities.
What does a webshop need to do?
Anyone can launch a new webshop; barriers to entry are low, but barriers to success are enormous.
Any commercial stack must support two key behaviours:
- Discovery is the opportunity to find the beings and doings of others.
- Delivery is the opportunity to express our being through our doings, or to enjoy the beings and doings of others. To be creative or legitimately acquire the creativity of others.
You can't rely on search engines to help you. You need - in the words of Raymond Ackerman - to "go where the tea is being made". To be part of what people already do.
Engaging with people where they already have community must play well with that community - creators, buyers and sellers, makers and users, readers and writers - and ensure their safety by ensuring:
- Simple and ethical rules which apply to all, ensuring diversity, equity and inclusion,
- Respect for the privacy and protection of its community,
- Protection of its community from force or fraud,
- Clear, transparent and fair means of discovery,
- Simple and low-cost means of delivery.
An accessible federated stack must also offer:
- Simple ways to deploy the same stack independently,
- Tools for migration between stacks without losing supporters or anything purchased,
- Equal opportunity for discovery across a federated network of equivalent services, subject to adherence to a common set of ethical rules,
- Moderation tools to support enforcement of ethical rules, whether the moral subject is an individual, or an entire other server.
Why is federation necessary to compete with monopolies?
Any centralised stack (be it Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Uber, AirBnB or Etsy) offers both discovery and delivery. But, they are also rent-seeking, in that they extract most of the value created by their creators, and do very little to uphold ethical values. Ethics are an expense and, in any case, controversy is good for "engagement".
They're equivalent to feudal landlords, charging their tenant farmers a significant share of what they produce and holding to themselves the right to turf any of their tenants off the land at any time, for any reason, rendering them instantaneously destitute.
Given these online spaces are entirely virtual, how did we get to a place where land is scarce, and landlords can do what they will?
The short answer is that - without ethics, standards and discipline - feudalism is inevitable. Learning why, and how it came to be, is crucial to understanding how to avoid it.
The early internet of the 1990s was a wild place. Along with blogs and early commercial sites were random interactive experiments with a tendency to explode, and lots and lots of porn.
Discovery was largely down to curated lists, webrings, web bookmarks, and search engines. Any of these could be open to spoofing, and so clicking on any link ran the risk of ending up on a porn site, or crashing your computer as some poorly configured website generated infinite new pages.
Yahoo offered curated search results. That's right, early Yahoo hand-curated every link, which scaled about as well as you can imagine it would.
Google arrived with a new algorithmic approach: weighting links by the number of inbound references. Suddenly, for a brief while, you could find things and - with discovery stabilised - delivery could really begin.
Every company started offering their own online shops. With that, they needed to ensure discovery, and the advertising market of contextual links exploded. Unfortunately, so did "search engine optimisation", referral links, and "me-too" sites.
Companies with economic heft could rise above the noise, but small startups had no way through the morass. Enter Amazon, eBay, Bookings and Facebook.
The challenge of selling online is discovery and delivery. If, though, you went inside a gated mall then - in exchange for a significant share of your income - you got protection and exposure.
Twitter and Facebook offered their sequential feed of people and services you were actually interested in by opting in to what they posted. Amazon, Booking, Uber and Etsy allowed you to buy things you could discover using a search engine that actually delivered on what you were looking for.
And again, for a while, that worked. But exploitation soon followed.
As before, the problem is "noise" which includes spam, chum, fraud, and hate speech. Worse, creators are deliberately trapped. Whether by relying on centralised systems of discovery (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) or delivery (Amazon, Uber, AirBnB, Etsy), where do you go?
The noise of enshittification really took off with the acquisition of Twitter in 2022 and an opportunity arose from IndieWeb's POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) philosophy when Mastodon's ActivityPub implementation took off.
Federation means that interoperable websites share a common way of communicating and sharing information. You can finally discover and curate a community. More importantly, federation returned moderation decision-making to small communities.
The rejoinder from the centralised stacks is that Mastodon is tiny, so why would you bother, but that's a bit like complaining that your favourite coffee shop only seats 20 while the huge department store can accommodate millions. Is that what you want from a café?
And so that is the task before me as I continue to build out Hop Sauna. A webshop that not only uses the open payments protocols to reduce the costs of exchange, but also offers communities an opportunity to moderate themselves while not losing the opportunity to be discovered.
I would love to hear from you … what features and requirements do you have from a community-moderated and federated webshop?
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