Communities should be non-profit and decentralized

In the German blogosphere there is a rather hot debate about a web community for university students called StudiVZ that is actually not much more than a Facebook clone. While this community doesn’t have any special features apart from the conventional social networking thing, it is gaining a lot of momentum in attention and user registration. It seems like everybody studying in a German or European university needs to be part of it. Of course, the operators behind StudiVZ had a hard time to keep up with this growth leading to issues regarding performance and privacy. While this already might cause some arousal among the ones that are a bit more critical about centralized communities (including me), the founder has been a bit stupid using Nazi propaganda to invite to his birthday party and show off a potential sellout to some big player.

Well, this is also part of the wonderful world of Web 2.0 while comparisons to the big bubble that bursted out of comercial anxiety seem to get more evident. Del.icio.us, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, etc are all extremely interesting phenomena. One could do – and a lot are doing – amazing research on web based community etc., oddly enough nobody asks about such things as power, influence, and money. If millions of users – often but not exclusively teenagers – are socially organized in centralized communities that are driven by comercial interests of the biggest players such as Yahoo, Google, and Murdoch’s News Corporation don’t we have some kind of issue here?

While this incident with this Nazi propaganda was just a foolery of some euphoric startup kid, centralized web communities always leave a bad aftertaste in my mouth. I think Web 2.0 and social software tastes best when they are part of a democratic, non-profit and (if possible) decentralized framework. Even though Wikipedia wouldn’t really work decentralized it shows how non-profit pays off for all. It is an extremely useful resource for the whole world. But also look at the blogosphere with its podcasting and everything. This is what i understand as Smart Mobs or Collective Intelligence in a totally positive way. Users remain individuals but become empowered humans in (mostly) meaningful social relations with each others. The mentioned centralized communities from above also have this positive networking character, yet the organizational structures behind – corporations seeking profit – always make them alarm bells ring. At the end of the day their interest is not participation, openness, and democracy, but profit.

To prevent culmination of power and profit we need decentral and democratic structures. There are a lot of examples in the real world but also in the world of bits and bytes. I am engaged in the Atomique project to create a decentralized and distributed way of photo sharing, but we should consider extending this to other resources as well. Furthermore – as Zwischenspeicher points out – we should question the role of search engines, trackers, and aggregators in this context.