Since this was our first meeting, we spent half the time discussing why we use social media in the first place, what scares us, what interests us about it, and how we would like to change it. Many mentioned that they were looking for access to authentic news on social media, which specific people more often spread than by professional media. All participants agreed on the potential of Mastodon and the political significance of this project. Personally, I was very gratified to find that the Museum of Care had indeed developed a community of like-minded people: it was easy for us to find common ground during an Assembly.
We discussed the parallels between Mastodon and the Museum of Care, which was created as a decentralized space, but technically the platform of the Museum is centralized, and the administration and developers fully control the site. It is possible that a truly decentralized Museum of Care could be implemented with Mastodon-like technology.
After discussion, we came to the following conclusions:
- The Museum of Care community wants to extend our communication beyond Zoom meetings, and Mastodon comes in handy for this purpose. A possible solution might be to create user accounts for each room in the Museum of Care to be used for communication.
- We aim to replace other social networks with Mastodon. However, an important part of our social media consumption is getting news from many sources. One possible solution to organize this on Mastodon is to develop a news aggregation tool in Graeber.social, creating a newsfeed that could be shared with the rest of the federation. So if you could share with us accounts on social media or other sources from which you get information, we will try to organize aggregation on a separate account in Mastodon and set up a room for the News of Care on museum.care.
- We mentioned the need to define simple but very specific rules to reach a general consensus on how to behave on the server. Moderation should be decentralized while allowing users to block information or people they do not wish to see. This will be the topic for our next Assembly at the end of May.
From now on, once a month during our Housekeeping Committees, we will devote around 15 minutes to Mastodon discussions.
