Soni's Blog

GAnarchy for Communities

This post isn't about a new version of GAnarchy, altho we did just recently add pinned repositories to it. Instead, it's more about how the GAnarchy workflow would look like for a community admin.

GAnarchy is built around communities. The whole idea of federation is that you can also defederate. More importantly tho, it allows one to place trust on instance admins, which is pretty great if a community of users wants to promote a fork of the software that renames it away from ableist slurs, or promote a fork by a team that takes ableism seriously, or whatever have you. Even if you're not a developer, you can still run a GAnarchy instance and pick some forks to pin and follow some other instances so you and your users can find out about other forks.

GAnarchy is about learning, sharing, contributing, but it's also about relinquishing. Relinquishing creative control, relinquishing authority. It's about saying, "hey, we don't know what the future holds. we don't know how ppl are gonna perceive things in the future. why should any one person dictate how the software should be developed, and how the software should interact with the users, what kinds of messaging should be promoted by the software, etc?". It's about understanding that software isn't just technology, but also a platform, a blog, a way to tell users how they should think.

Once one recognizes that, it becomes pretty scary to focus so much on upstreams. The need for forks that meet different needs becomes pretty obvious, and that need should be acknowledged, not suppressed! GAnarchy isn't our project - yes, we started it, but we effectively have no control over it. And that's why it exists. That's the whole point. That's always been the point.