I have been giving some thought to the next steps for the coop brum tech infrastructure. I will lay out my thoughts in preparation for a coherent proposal later.
Here’s a rough outline of ideas in no order:
Buy brum.coop domain name
Migrate forum to forum.brum.coop (will this break historic links?)
Mastodon is a decentralised social media that is part of the Fediverse. Social movements around the world are using it to share information and build community free from corporate domination, censorship and hostile algorithms. I’ve noticed it’s becomepopular in Catalunya.
I will publish more of a rationale for why we should invest in community tech infrastructure at some point but essentially we should be moving away as much as possible from The Authoritarian Stack and towards a democratic community controlled technology. Otherwise we will be forever being manipulated and controlled by malicious U.S. tech corporations.
In practice, I would see this operating as a kind of decentralised 0121 Do One information sharing service. We would invite groups to have accounts on our brum.social fedi server which would increase visibility into what everyone is up to in Birmingham without getting nerfed by say the Instagram algorithm which is designed to overwhelm our senses and trash our self esteem in order so we’re more vulnerable to advertising and data collection.
Very early days though for this idea. Would need buy in from different groups.