4 ms·

strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome A “strong” community necessarily has members and non-members, insiders and outsiders. If it doe

• krapp 7y ago
  If you think of the internet, as a whole, as a single "community" then you're right - and I think it would be infeasible to apply a particular moral or ethical (and inevitably cultural and political) standard at that level, since "the internet" literally encompasses all of humanity. But if the internet is seen for what it is, a network of networks and the web a community of communities then there's no paradox - if one is not comfortable or welcomed in one community, one can move to, or start, another community that more accepting. But then, that allows for exactly the sort of toxic and abusive communities and users that TBL and many others believe are "destroying" the web. And they're kind of correct, but not because these communities exist, per se, or because the 'wrong sorts of people' are allowed to use the web, but because visibility and dialogue has been mostly centralized along a few large platforms with disproportionate influence, and as a result of the effect of SEO and social media algorithms, much of the diversity of the web has been filtered out for the sake of extremist and commercial content.