From the post:
Big Tech platforms make it easy to start a group, but hard to build a community that controls its own future. Their priorities can change overnight, features stagnate or vanish, and your collective knowledge ends up locked inside someone else’s system—hard to find and harder to build on.
Different tools have created different community cultures. Mailing lists invite slower, more reflective exchanges and build up an email archive over time. Forums like Discourse organise conversations by topic and tag, making it normal to return to older threads and turn discussion into shared reference. Real‑time chat tools—Slack, Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp and their open‑source cousins—create fast, conversational spaces where people feel close and responsive, but where decisions and insights often vanish into the scroll.
In “Strengthening Online Communities,” an online workshop on Wednesday, July 29th from 3:00–4:30 pm UTC, we’ll explore how to design digital spaces that balance these cultures while aligning with the values at the heart of Rise Against Big Tech: collaboration, transparency, and community control.
We’re getting ready to launch a space for the Rise Against Big Tech online community and would love to learn from others who have set up and maintained online communities. We’ll share our own learnings about what has—and hasn’t—worked when trying to nurture collective memory and long‑term collaboration online.
Rather than centring any single tool, we’ll look at how forums, mailing lists, group chat, and hybrids like Discourse can support communities that want their conversations and decisions to be findable years from now, not just until the next scroll. We’ll touch on why we’re considering Discourse for the RABT community space, alongside open‑source chat tools like Mattermost and Zulip, and discuss how to match tools to the kinds of knowledge and relationships your community is trying to sustain.
Together, we’ll explore:
- How relying on proprietary platforms like Google Groups and commercial chat apps can undermine long‑term community memory and autonomy.
- How mailing list, forum, and chat cultures shape what gets remembered, shared, and lost.
- Practical ways to design your infrastructure and norms so your group’s knowledge is easier to find, reuse, and grow over time using open‑source, community‑controlled tools.
This online workshop is for anyone running mailing lists, mutual aid networks, campaigns, or member spaces who wants their digital infrastructure to help their community get smarter together—not to reinforce Big Tech’s surveillance and profit models.
Please share with anyone who might find participating useful!