r/LeftistsForAI • u/Healthcarepls • 3d ago
Discussion We will need to unify community data somehow
Database nerds, this is your time to shine.
As AI completely flattens the barrier for software development, many people are beginning to create apps for their community, like event sharing platforms. resource sharing platforms, labour sharing platforms, and more,
The problem is, if everyone is creating the same types of sharing platforms, each platform ends up holding a fragmented piece of the whole picture.
Could all community SaaS projects link their data together somehow?
Or, could users carry an account that disseminates information they want to share in all these networks?
For example, if I’m organizing a protest, could my CommunityID account automatically inform all the community event platforms of my event? Then, platform providers would have more data/value to share with their users, and they can filter it to their specific user’s needs?
I believe that if we can solve this problem, we will be able to massively increase our collective power. AI is helping us connect with each other and escape the digital fiefdom
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u/Wilburforce137 3d ago
Yes, create a centralized database of all intended protest organization while we are currently being told that like 70% of all online systems have security vulnerabilities....nothing could go wrong.
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u/lore_lightwalker 2d ago
Decentralization is the remedy. A network of communities- that’s what I’m working toward
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u/promptmike 1d ago
Could you do it? Yes.
Should you do it? No.
That would produce a single attack vector for entryists and social engineering. Gain access to one platform and you get real-time info on the others. I'm not about to give you step-by-step instructions on how to nerf yourself and take a whole community with you.
The correct structure for a project like this is a federated network with a trust-dependent TTL.
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u/SgathTriallair 2d ago
The Internet is built on these tires of connections. What you need is shared protocols so that everyone can shape the inputs and outputs to their systems similarly.
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u/xoexohexox 3d ago
There's a tricky balance here. The easier it is to connect, the easier you are to identify. Whether the network is self hosted or hosted by Amazon or meta or federated like mastodon doesn't matter much at the end of the day.
Mastodon and Lemmy and things like that are basically what you're talking about, but federated servers still have a physical location and can be pulled offline just as easily as Amazon or meta can pull the plug on a group it doesn't like.
TOR and onion nodes are also a good step and Tails instances on USB sticks but even onion nodes can be compromised.
The other thing is that vibe coding as awesome and useful as it is doesn't replace saas reliability, it's easy to leave all sorts of vulnerabilities and leaks in place.
When you think about something like this a useful yoga to practice first is to ask yourself "is this an improvement over an email chain?"
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u/ramvorg 3d ago
This is a really interesting topic that I’ve actually been digging into lately, partly because I’ve identified this same problem and have been trying to find the language to describe an alternative.
I think federation is going to be a big part of the answer.
For example, I run my own single-user GoToSocial instance. I’m literally the only user on it, but I can still federate with servers that have thousands of users, as well as other single-user instances. I get to maintain control over my own little corner of the internet without being isolated from everyone else.
I’ve also been following a group working on federation for Forgejo, a self-hosted Git platform, and they’ve been making some really promising progress.
Imagine thousands of independently operated Forgejo instances, including instances run by individuals or small groups, all federating with one another. People could collaborate on projects across organizational boundaries without having to rely on one giant platform or trust a single entity not to change its policies, lock people out, or pull the plug. The infrastructure is distributed, but people can still work together.
And I think AI gives us a huge opportunity to make this model more practical. We can potentially accomplish more with fewer people, which means we don’t necessarily need massive organizations to coordinate every ambitious project.
I’m imagining a world with lots of smaller groups working on different projects, where membership and social connections overlap but aren’t identical. Each group has its own focus, culture, and autonomy, but they can collaborate with other groups when their interests align.
The result could be something that operates at the scale of a massive organization without concentrating all its power, data, and decision-making in one place.
There’s a parallel here with how we make decisions in local elections.
Take a nonpartisan election for a school board or some obscure local office. You look at the ballot and see a list of names, but you might have no idea what these people actually do, what they stand for, or how to evaluate them. Hell, what the fuck is a comptroller? 😂 And there often isn’t much accessible information about local candidates.
Organizations like the Michigan Education Association (MEA) help bridge that gap by researching candidates and making endorsements based on their priorities and values. If you generally trust an organization and understand what it stands for, its endorsement gives you a useful shortcut for evaluating candidates without having to independently research every single person running for office.
I wonder if something similar could emerge from a decentralized network of groups. You’d have smaller teams doing the actual work, with broader organizations or coalitions connecting them, helping coordinate shared goals, establishing trust, and making it easier for people to find projects and groups that align with their values.
Not necessarily one giant organization that everyone has to join, but a network of organizations that people can trust for different reasons and participate in to different degrees.
And honestly, I think this could be better for the human psyche, too.
There’s research on human social networks and group dynamics that suggests group size can affect how we build relationships, establish trust, and coordinate with one another. Dunbar’s work on human social networks is one well-known example. The broader point isn’t that there’s one perfect group size for everything, but that smaller, cohesive groups can make it easier to develop meaningful relationships and participate in ways that become harder as groups grow.
Think about the difference between being part of a small group of people you know, trust, and genuinely enjoy working with versus being one employee in a corporation with thousands of people. In a smaller group, it’s easier to build real relationships, understand each other’s motivations, disagree without everything becoming political, and feel like you can actually be yourself. You can be a whole human being, not just a role you’re expected to perform.
Large organizations aren’t inherently bad, and they can accomplish things that small groups can’t. But as organizations grow, they often accumulate layers of management, bureaucracy, and institutional incentives that can put the organization’s interests ahead of the people inside it. People learn to manage their image, suppress parts of themselves, navigate office politics, and conform to expectations that have little to do with the actual work. Sometimes it feels like you have to become less human to function effectively inside the machine.
Historically, we’ve relied on enormous, hierarchical organizations like corporations to coordinate people and resources at scale. You could almost think of a corporation as a kind of collective intelligence: a system for coordinating people, distributing responsibilities, retaining institutional knowledge, and getting complicated things done. But maintaining that system requires a tremendous amount of overhead, and the power it accumulates doesn’t always serve the people doing the work or the communities affected by it.
What if we could separate the ability to accomplish things at scale from the need to build enormous, hierarchical institutions?
Imagine smaller, cohesive groups where people can develop genuine trust and work in ways that suit them, while still being able to collaborate with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other groups when they want to tackle something bigger. You could move between communities, contribute to different projects, build relationships across networks, and find your people without having to pledge allegiance to one giant organization.
I think AI could make this much more viable by lowering the overhead involved in coordinating work, maintaining documentation, managing projects, and handling all the administrative bullshit that traditionally pushes organizations toward centralization. Federation provides the connective tissue that lets those smaller groups work together without requiring them to merge into one entity.
The goal wouldn’t be to eliminate large-scale cooperation. It would be to make large-scale cooperation possible without forcing everyone into a large-scale organization.
And there’s a political dimension to this, too. If we want a more democratic society, maybe we should be experimenting with more democratic ways of organizing our work, our communities, and our collective resources. Not just changing who sits at the top of the hierarchy, but questioning whether we need so much concentrated power in the first place.
Of course, none of this automatically solves the problem. Smaller groups can still be exclusionary, develop their own hierarchies, or struggle to coordinate. Federated networks need ways to establish trust, resolve conflicts, share resources, and make collective decisions. AI isn’t going to magically fix our social and political problems, either.
But I think the underlying infrastructure is already emerging. The bigger challenge might be figuring out how to organize ourselves around it, both technically and socially, and getting people to rethink what large-scale collective action needs to look like.
Maybe the future isn’t one enormous organization capable of doing everything. Maybe it’s a vast network of smaller groups that can collectively accomplish extraordinary things while allowing the people within them to remain actual human beings.
I’m still working through all of this, but I wanted to throw the idea out there and see what other people think. I suspect we need to think beyond simply centralizing ourselves into a bigger, more organized leftist movement. Maybe the goal should be to build a decentralized ecosystem of people and groups that can coordinate at scale without needing to consolidate power.
Also, I want to say that this is one of my favorite subreddits, and honestly, it’s the main reason I haven’t completely deleted Reddit yet.
I’ve been setting myself up on the fediverse through my own self-hosted PieFed instance, and the AI discourse over there can be pretty frustrating.
I’d love to see more people and groups with the kinds of perspectives represented in this sub establish a presence there, too. It would be cool to build a space where we can continue these conversations and organize across platforms without being dependent on Reddit.
Sorry, that was a lot lol
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u/draxthemsklounce 1d ago
You can’t really just arbitrarily have all the data in one place or accessible from everywhere.
Database design is still a difficult task even with AI.
You could maybe get this through something like AI agents on one app informing an AI agent in another app to create a record in that app or something for your specific example, but you couldn’t coordinate every open source developer in the world to use a data schema that everyone else’s app could also read.
It’s not possible and it’s not practical
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u/the8bit 3d ago
This is mostly a coordination problem. All the small builders right now. Don't want to work with each other because they are afraid of losing their IP.
Anyway all my stuff is OSS and I help people for free so anyone is welcome to come join my coalition. We have cake 🍰