Community-to-community network

I've been doing a lot of thinking about online communities and social networks in response to both recent events (election) and a reading of a couple of blog posts/talks about how the many-to-many social networks seem to amplify the worst in human tendencies:

=> Baldur Bjarnason with a real-life example of twitter trolls making someone's life hell | Erin Kissane on the Strengths and Weaknesses of our networks

quoting from Kissane's talk:

...And there’s a pretty strong belief in many quarters that because of corporate predation and human nature, no many-to-many social system can ultimately be anything but corrosive.

I ascribe heavily to this belief. I think a big part of what has allowed the current rightward trend of politics is the amplified voice that anger-stoking reactionaries get on platforms like twitter, under its current leadership. So, after the election, the thought I had was: how do we change these information systems to prevent the spread of bad information, and disincentivize troll-y behavior? As Kissane notes in her talk, these platforms are great for sharing what's happening in the world, and connecting people who otherwise wouldn't be connected. Those connections can lead to great things.

A root cause of the problem with many-to-many social networks is, in my opinion, that humans aren't very good at large communities. Some people can manage remote empathy with mindfulness, but for many, a death on the other side of the world is simply a statistic. This isn't an evil - no person can hold all the world's suffering without exploding. Humans have a hard time summoning empathy for people who are remote, and as a result, we're much better suited to small communities of people immediately around us [citation needed]. We can better summon our care when the number of people we summon it for is limited.

As a result, when I think of ways to alter our model of social networks, I tried to think of ways to keep the userbase small, while retaining some sense of the global connection. One thought I've had this morning: a community-to-community based network. I drew some inspiration from tilde.town for this. Imagine a social network where you can only speak directly to members of your own community, but each community publishes a correspondence piece that can be read by others - this might take the form of a zine or newsletter, highlighting interesting discussions or news points from within the community. In this way, communities in need, or wishing to broadcast a call-to-action, can share their situation, but individuals can't come in to derail the conversation with their reactions. Ideally, individuals also wouldn't be exposed to random assholes from outside their community.

Obviously, this is a half-baked idea. What would the inter-community protocol be? Having something automated runs the risk of algorithm-gaming that already plagues our existing systems. Having a curated broadcast would require significant volunteer effort, which would run the risk of dominating the inter-community conversation with the voices of the individuals who publish the newsletters. Also, the possibility of people creating "communities" of 1 would collapse the model completely.

I'm not sure how to conclude this. It seems clear to me that a radical rethink of our social networks is necessary in order to disrupt the status quo of reactionary nonsense. Unfortunately, though, the pieces I read on the topic - including the ones I linked at the beginning, here, are frustratingly short on actual ideas that we can try. I'd love to read actual discussions of what can be done differently. Hopefully, this idea can at least spur some sort of brainstorming.