Governance in Physical Spaces
Content Warning: Light mention of animal abuse. Skip 🧯section.
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In August 2024, on a block of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, some people in neighborhood created the "Bed-Stuy Aquarium" on the corner of Hancock and Tompkins.
Someone else in the neighborhood was upset about this aquarium, citing animal abuse of the goldfish put in the puddle. They had posted on Reddit1 to go about solving the problem.
A "local" newspaper picked up the story2, interviewing both parties. The person responsible for starting the aquarium said:
“We all just came together to do something different for the community,” Mr. Irving said. “We decided to spice it up.”
At the time of posting in 2024, r/BedStuy had 9,3K members
But in 2026, this number has increased 3-fold:
Although Reddit changed the UI. Instead of displaying subscribers, it displays weekly visitors. The actual total "member" amount is 25K, which I found through a weird UX workaround by opening any post and scrolling to the comments:
Not that this matters.
After the story was picked up by mainstream media, u/Plantsnotpants made a final post:
I posted on a local thread because I wanted a local solution...Someone who followed this mess from the articles made a great suggestion to try and get some leadership in the community to try and act as an intermediary on this and I would be more than happy to see that. If anyone has like the head of the blocks association contact or something similar I’d like to get in contact with them. In hindsight, that could’ve and should’ve been the first step.
But this story didn't stay local. In fact, the "local" newpaper that picked it up was the New York Times, which has at least 10 million subscribers3:
The entire New York City population is ~8 million people, Bed-Stuy is ~180K, and an individual block might have 1K people in that radius4.
But does a neighborhood have official leadership? How would that be designated?
If you say "Oh but that's what government is for", then yeah you are right for sure elected officials definitely act in everyone's best interest. After all, this is what they did to the aquarium two months later, in October 20245:
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Governance in Online Spaces
Let's look at some examples of governance in online spaces. From early to indie web, being anonymous was exciting. But spaces were still owned and moderated (or not) by the people who ran them.
milliondollarhomepage.com
Alex Tew in 2005 wanted to pay for college by selling pixels on a 1000x1000 grid. This was owned by him, a single individual that could make choices on who had the ability to buy space. There are a ton of advertisements and porn.
r/place (2017)6
r/place was a subreddit that ran on April Fools that operated under a system of rules: with your Reddit account, you can pick a pixel and choose it's color. But, to pick another pixel you have to wait 5-20 minutes depending on if your account is verified by email. Designed by Josh Wardle (yes, the Wordle guy), this places really interesting constraints and typically communities rather than individuals are going to be more successful at claiming a place. But, this was owned and moderated by Reddit and tied to your Reddit account.
As an aside, I also participated with my tech club in college, and here's our little spot:
onemillioncheckboxes.com
Made by Nolen in June 20247, a game where the goal is to check every box. Every person might have a different goal: to check, or uncheck, the boxes. But we can't stop people from unchecking, we just need to keep checking in order to win. So somewhat self-moderated, but the labor on the individual to upkeep the game's intentions.
www.yourworldoftext.com
Andrew Badr made yourworldoftext in August 20098. This is an infinite grid of text that is editable by any visitor. This is both self-moderated and owned by a single guy. Somebody might write a mean comment, but someone else can overwrite it. But there's no way to remove the mean person or the mean comments in this implementation since everyone is anonymous.
Decentralization
In The Score by C. Thi Nguyen9:
The technology of the internet—and of social media—appears, on its surface, to be deeply decentralized. Anybody can get an account on social media, or start a website, and start pumping out content… The appearance of decentralization is partly an illusion… [The internet] decentralizes content production. But it also forces everybody to access that content through a small number of search algorithms— which represent a massive centralization of attention.
In these early / indie web examples, we see how we are still under control of somebody else. We are at the whims, or lack of, someone else's attention and moderation. And moderating is a ton of work! In August of 2026, CU Boulder published Conflict Systems, a zine detailing different approaches to navigating conflict in digital spaces10. In the zine, they had contributors write about their experiences, to which Dorthy Howard says:
The complexity of people's life, mental health, and economics all factor into how we interact online.
We are consistently flattened into 2-D, where only a sliver of ourselves exists. And people make inferences based on that flattening. We intentionally flatten ourselves to fit in with specific communities.
Every digital community is built from a tool.
Forums (4Chan, Reddit)
Macroblogs (Tumblr, Facebook, Cohost (rip))
Microblogs (Twitter, Mastodon)
Photo Sharing (Instagram)
File Sharing (Google Drive, Github, Bluesky*)
Money Sharing (Paypal, Venmo)
Each one of these places has a particular energy and culture. You likely present as a different person on Instagram versus Reddit, probably because you don't even post photos of yourself on Reddit! And we want to fit in to all these places, so we mask ourselves.
Let's talk about Bluesky*. Just kidding.
Let's talk about *atproto
atproto is short for AT Protocol which is short for Authenticated Transfer Protocol. Things built using atproto/AT Protocol/Authenticated Transfer Protocol are referred to the Atmosphere. So applications made using atproto, like Bluesky, Blacksky, or Eurosky live in the Atmosphere (this is also why they include "sky" if this is new information).
According to https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-ethos:
atproto adds two core innovations: identity-based authority and the separation of data hosting from the rich applications built on top of it.
at wrote a nice explainer titled "What is the Atmosphere" and has a nice TLDR:
So this is similar to Google, where you can have one account to log you into everything, but you are the one owning your data.
11 wrote "Essential resources for getting started with AT Protocol":
Fundamentally, the AT Protocol is about data ownership. Lexicons define structure for data, data is stored in records on a Personal Data Server (PDS), and the protocol defines how data is moved. It's way more complicated than that, but that gets you like 80% of the way there in most cases. These are some resources that are useful for the data part of AT Protocol development.
atproto is a tool to share files
Every file is effectively a JSON that stores data. What the protocol does is enable accounts to share those files pretty easily.
illustrates this really nicely in "A Social Filesystem"
Why atproto is interesting for creatives
- 1.
It doesn't matter what the UI looks like
- 2.
There is infinite remixability
- 3.
You can choose who shows up and where
Important caveat: You get agency, but not necessarily privacy. Data is public and accounted for. But we get to choose who can interact.
wrote "The power we use and the power we give":
Your engagement and your work, not unlike your vote, is a form of power, something you can choose to grant to others. Those others, particularly organizations and companies, accrue that power to use as they see fit.
So why are you still on Twitter giving Elon money???????????? When you can own your own data?????????
In the Atmosphere
- 1.
blacksky.community + Acorn
wrote about Acorn, Blacksky's content moderation platform:
But more than that our moderators wanted an interface that felt friendly and approachable. They deserved the tools to be intentional with moderation, so we built in features to let them start and end moderation sessions so that they could check in with themselves before starting and choose how much work (and emotional burden) they felt capable of taking on. Moderation is a team effort, so we built an ability for moderators to tag each other on difficult cases that required more than one review.
A moderation platform designed to care about the moderators, and acknowledge their labor.
- 2.
The wait is over... Anisota virginiensis is here! A big evolution in our experiment of what social media can be. • Spells • Post Poetry • Blended Feeds • Alt Text Generator • Post Adviser • Support for @standard.site, @grain.social, @teal.fm, @leaflet.pub • More... Enter the forest: anisota.net
A more poetic way to scroll! Why the fuck are we always scrolling down?
- 3.
The little guys are chasing for my attention!
ourworldsoftext
Okay so the meat of this talk was to discuss the experiment that and I conducted last month at atproto.nyc 2026 community day where we hung out with other atproto freaks and talked about alternative systems.
We are both "creative technologists"12, people interested in alternative implementations of using software to make art. Brent pitched making an atproto port of yourworldoftext, both as a way of peeling back the layers of atproto for our own pursuits.
I will eventually add 's blog on the more technical details of this project, stay tuned!
It doesn't matter if we delete the website, the data still exists for you. You own your data and control who has access to your board. The purpose is the agency that you have as a person: to choose to engage (or not) with someone and having that customization to do so.
And I'm not out here going RAH RAH ATPROTO OR DEATH because that's not it. I don't have a Mastodon because I'm scared to preemptively pick a community, it feels like having to choose a clique before I even get to school (Do I check the goth box or the nerd box?). But also, you get to choose where you go. Both Bluesky and Mastodon give you agency in different ways.
We feel powerless when a monolith tries to act on our behalf and when it doesn't act in our interest, the purpose of the monolith fails. Having agency is the first step in decentralization.
The choice lies with us to talk to our neighbors, clean up trash and build community. We can take our little aquarium somewhere else if we have the space for it. So instead of being at the whims of someone else, we can make our own joy.
xx
smh
This was originally given as a talk at Chinatown JS on 9/15/2026, and you can see the original slides here: https://atpr.to/@smarmy.space/chinatownjs-slides