What would the design of a large-scale social coordination system look like if its primary "user" were not an individual person, but a group chat? In the relationship between a bureaucracy (i.e. state or corporation) and a person, the difference in scale and power is too vast for the person to really feel any care or belonging. And to have those feelings is a basic human need. The public social media platforms pretend to accommodate this need with networks built from 1:1 consensual connections, but their economic incentives drive them toward levels of scale and public exposure that meet it shallowly or not at all. So those of us who don't want to maintain the thick skin and continuous partial attention needed to survive in those environments, which is most of us, have retreated to private group chats that are small and personal enough for care and belonging to be possible. Group chats are illegible to outsiders; they're small enough for simple forms of moderation and membership control to suffice; they're the reemergence of village/tribal forms in the digital world. They are an important buffer layer between the individual and the depersonalizing force of bureaucracy. But we don't give them first-class attention in the design of our products… #todo Related: - [Governable Spaces](https://nathanschneider.info/books/governable-spaces/) - [Moving Castles](https://trust.support/feed/moving-castles) - [Squad Wealth](https://otherinter.net/research/squad-wealth/) - [Cozyweb](https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-extended-internet-universe)