hey @xj9 (桃), i'm going to follow your lead, @one.butt.nz no longer provides a public invite. i cleaned up the pub registry, there's no more public pubs! (i found the rest to be unreliable, please put back up if i'm mistaken)

@jolyon, we need user invites, not open invitations. However, by turning off all of the latter, then we're locking down this island of scuttleverse.

I think this is so critical that I'm pausing mobile development to do something about pubs and invites.

Yeah, I don't think we should lock down. But we don't need to collectively agree. Those who want to keep this island open should put up pubs.

@dinosaur, not having an open inviting public pub might stifle adoption. I mean, do new people who have, say read @andrestaltz's blogs, have to email pub owners to beg admission to join the scuttleverse?

@jolyon yep, that's the idea!

i have a question: is adoption what we really need?

to me, it's far more important to nurture our small community, to explore the emerging solarpunk cultural practices, to develop better technical systems for our current uxerbase, to strengthen the relationships already present, to practice more economic flows amongst the network, etc. to be honest, i think a growth strategy is risky, a public pub approach could easily lead to our network being infected by frogs, or growing faster than our ability to disseminate culture as an Eternal September.

by increasing the barrier to entry, we aren't making it impossible for newbies to join, we're instead supporting strong community boundaries. people will still join by either being invited by a butt (i'm happy to give out invites to @one.butt.nz) or asking a pub owner (hard to believe in our instant on-demand economy).

the above being said, i'm going to pitch a grant for April to develop better pub infrastructure and a hosted pub-as-a-service product, so anyone can host their own pub. i want everyone to be able to have a pub, so the network can expand through peer-to-peer social connections on private pubs. if someone wants their pub to be public-facing, that's up to them.

another reason i prefer strong community boundaries over public entry: %bM6TrtR..., %iQw5UWU..., and the paradox of tolerance.

@inoas

It was very hard to get on board without physically / personally knowing anyone.

i'm pretty happy with our network being hard to join unless you personally know somebody, that's been a happy pattern in meatspace so why not cypherspace?

I'd not even be here.

do you expect that you're able to participate in any community you want to? i thought being invited to a community is a gift you receive, not an entitlement you take. you might want to check your privilege, if i'm reading what you're saying.

I think tinkering with "more closed" pubs can easily break any traction #ssb has right now.

for me personally, i'm not looking for more relationships on Scuttlebutt, i want stronger relationships on Scuttlebutt. if anyone wants more relationships with randos, then they are welcome to start your own public pub. i'm happy with the new relationships i've been given on Scuttlebutt, now i want to nurture them into something more.

i'm not looking for more relationships on Scuttlebutt, i want stronger relationships on Scuttlebutt

so much this. the idea of connecting everything and everyone isn't extremely interesting or novel. we did that already. there are places without internet, of course, but that's a logistical problem, not a technical one.

what i'm interested in is creating technology that fosters and enables intimate connections. there are already plenty of social media things that can give you as much casual interaction as you have time for. one of the (many) things that makes scuttlebutt appealing to me is the community's focus on trust and their holistic approach to creating an next-gen social networking protocol.

one of the advantages i see to having stronger ties is that the critical mass required to make ssbc a self-sustaining community is much smaller. since there are ties other than gravity holding the community together.

so boundaries are fascist now? wew lad/lass, that's a bit much. nobody is entitled to inclusion in my social circles. i pick my own friends. a community has every right to be as inclusive or exclusive as the members like. one of the great things about Scuttlebutt is that nobody controls the infrastructure. if you want to set up an open pub, you're welcome to! there is a lot of work being done to make that easier to do!

operating a pub is a purely voluntary action on my part. if you want an open pub, set one up. i have the right to create my own spaces online, and i have the right to exclude anyone i please from said spaces. i'm not sorry that we disagree, and i'm definitely not going to adjust my behavior to conform to what your ideology says is "correct behavior".

we can get along, with the condition that you don't try to tell me what to do. m'kay?

against consensus

is an important thing to bring up here. the tech is made to put you in charge of your own perception of the network. some of us prefer more tightly nit group, others want to have a more open thing that mirrors reddit or twitter.

here's the deal tho, on reddit there are both open and closed groups. some subs have rules, others don't, the enforcement of said rules varies too. however, without the ability to define boundaries the loudest most aggressive voices are always going to dominate the conversation. i might like you or agree with you (or not), but none of these give you a right to take up space and consume resources on my computer or my pub.

When I see responses like this, I'm very happy that my client didn't sync the messages to which you're responding.

Not every fence needs a gate.