The internet is this big confusing place. I want a place that feels like home for me… It’s easier, in some ways, to do governance around these real communities because you can say, “We have some shared assumptions in common. We have some shared belief. We know that we need this space because there’s no other spaces out there for us.”

– Ethan Zuckerman in The Good Web: Competing Visions for the Future of Social Media

When I think about The Good Web, it was one full of real communities. We have real communities today, but they are far more porous and amorphous. Real communities on centralized platforms confront mega-scale problems within tiny spaces, and the poorly defined boundaries on most mass social platforms breaks down the ability to do community governance.

The Good Web was filled with bad behavior– the abusive forum or list moderator is an ancient web archetype. It wasn’t always welcoming, but it was governable.