Big Tech platforms make it easy to start a group, but hard to build a community that controls its own future. Their priorities can change overnight, features stagnate or vanish, and your collective knowledge ends up locked inside someone else’s system—hard to find and harder to build on.
Different tools have created different community cultures. Mailing lists invite slower, more reflective exchanges and build up an email archive over time. Forums like Discourse organise conversations by topic and tag, making it normal to return to older threads and turn discussion into shared reference. Real‑time chat tools—Slack, Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp and their open‑source cousins—create fast, conversational spaces where people feel close and responsive, but where decisions and insights often vanish into the scroll.
In “Strengthening Online Communities,” an online workshop on Wednesday, July 29th from 3:00–4:30 pm UTC, we’ll explore how to design digital spaces that balance these cultures while aligning with the values at the heart of Rise Against Big Tech: collaboration, transparency, and community control.
Read the rest at How To Rise Against Big Tech
Add new comment