Several months ago I had a lot of ideas rolling around in my head regarding this idea of community, networking (social and electronic), and administration. It looked something like this and like this.
From a post I wrote on community:
As working-class people, as wage laborers, as members of physical and digital communities, there must be a way to reorganize our digital social lives so that we can bridge the gap between the global and the local. So much of the "local" is lost in the global digital sea. Hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people all live within the local range of each of us, and yet the platforms we engage with thrust us into communicating with people hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of miles away. Much of this has to do with capital accumulation, you need to centralize as many people into your tent to maximize profits. This, in a way, is a form of capitalist encirclement. Our digital lives, and digital communities, are at the mercy of capitalist rule and often subjected to capitalist discipline.
I still feel this is broadly true. In the time since I made this post Hexbear has had its ups and downs, both social, and technical. We've nearly lost our domain address, we've had a fair few struggle sessions, we've debated the contradiction between posters and mods. We've seen new left communities emerge into our space, like the comrades at Anarchist Nexus. The social consciousness of places like db0 have made qualitative shifts leading to principled action to protect their community from fascists. Our own @TankieTanuki@hexbear.net is suffering from success, hosting our beloved TankieTube. We've seen the reputation of piefed (a competing solution in the Reddit-like space) have its reputation tarnished over a silly comment I made about how it works. I launched news.abolish.capital, which continues to deliver left news to roughly 50 Lemmy instances every day. I'm sure there is more I'm missing!
What this represents is a growing network of like-minded people, all willing to put in their own time, energy, and money, into building what I think can be called a Proletariat Network, or The Proletarian Web. An Anti-capitalist, revolutionary, network creating spaces that allow us all to communicate, educate, and uplift each other from across the world. We are a diverse, funny, skilled, and resourceful group of people to be sure!
I hesitate to prescribe what exactly The Proletarian Web is, because I think it is bigger then any single persons ideas. All I've done here is what amounts to branding. A logo and a title, to go with my observations.
I write this out as a kind of springboard. I'm currently in the process of finally putting a front page on the abolish.capital domain I bought several months ago. In doing so, it got me thinking about this idea again. I want to include a kind of, manifesto if you will, about what exactly "The Proletarian Web" is, on the site. I want to compile a list of communities and sites that constitute that idea. I want to build a hub that makes The Proletarian Web accessible to more people, to direct them to more places.
I think though, if I'm going to be doing something like that, I can't just rely on my own ideas. I think I need to hear from you, those who inhabit this space along with me. After all, this thing that is forming isn't doing so by itself in isolation. It is the accumulative efforts of all of us! I think whatever we describe The Proletarian Web to be, should be a reflection of the people who exist there.
Interesting ideas, one of the ways I can envision this is in creating something similar to the Open Collective, which provides a central location to find all these sites and also a central way to fund them by donating.
It will have a manifesto that focuses much more on the proletarian aspect and less so on the FOSS side of it, taking that as a given instead.
Also it would focus more on linking these sites and enabling communication between all interested people that want to share knowledge or get any kind of help (could be technical, could even be about community building), and it can also link to actual socialist orgs around the world for people to take that action to the real world.
Eventually maybe it could also function as a tiny search engine, filling in the gap left by the actual search engines that either by intent or just by plain enshittification, can no longer provide any useful results related to any of the sites mentioned.
A negative part of this, if successful, is that it would be easier for the ruling class to find every single tiny part of the internet that refuses to promote their world view, their rewriting of history, and their rotten values, and crush them or infiltrate them. That however is a fact that you have to deal with in any case, class struggle doesn't stop if you refuse to fight, and an indie internet is no exception.