I grew up on a farm at Dunneworthy, near Ararat, where independence isn’t a lifestyle choice. Nobody is coming to fix the pump. You work it out, or it doesn’t get done. But nobody on a farm is truly alone either. They turn up when the shed burns down, and everyone knows who pulls their weight and who doesn’t. Self-reliance and community weren’t opposites. They were the same habit, seen from two sides.

Rugby taught me the same thing. I played at state level, then semi-professionally in England, until a broken leg ended it. Fifteen stubborn individuals only become anything when they agree to play for each other. The best players I knew were the most independent-minded and the most committed to the side.

Then I spent fifteen years in banking, and learnt the opposite lesson. A large organisation offers neither independence nor community. You don’t govern yourself, and you don’t really belong to anything you help govern. You comply. Decisions arrive from somewhere above, wrapped in process, owned by no one you can argue with. I chafed under it.

It took me a while to realise the Greeks had already named what I was looking for.

Free, together

To the ancient Greeks, independence and community were not in tension. Freedom, eleutheria, meant not having a master: not being a slave, and not living under a tyrant. But it was not the modern freedom to be left alone. A free man was free because he took part. He spoke in the assembly, argued, voted, and then lived under laws he and his fellow citizens had made. Aristotle called us politikon zōon, creatures of the polis. Outside a community, he said, a man is either a beast or a god.

But the Greek idea had a blind spot. Citizenship was for a minority, and women, slaves and foreigners were shut out. But the core insight survives: you cannot be free alone, and you cannot be free in a community you have no say in running.

The new tyrants

Look at where most communities live now.

The local footy club runs on a Facebook group and a WhatsApp chat. The residents’ association keeps its members in a spreadsheet on someone’s Google Drive. The choir, the surf club, the parents’ committee: all of them tenants, on land owned by a handful of companies on the other side of the world.

Those companies are not malicious. But they are masters. They decide who can see a post, what may be said, which members are reachable, what the data is worth and to whom. They change the rules without a vote. When a community’s page is shut, its group throttled or its history lost, there is no assembly to appeal to. The Greeks had a word for rule like that, and it was not democracy.

We have rebuilt the tyranny the Greeks fought to escape, and we did it for convenience.

Self-government is a practice

I founded Princes Park Touch to have fun, and it became something more. Today it has more than 760 members, and 500 to 600 people play each season. It runs on its own infrastructure: its own website, its own member records, its own communications, with no Facebook group holding the keys. Members can see the rules. The club answers to them, and every year the committee reports to them at the AGM.

It is not frictionless. Self-government never is. People have to turn up, argue, accept outcomes they voted against, and hold each other to the standards they set. That is the price of freedom, and it is cheaper than the alternative.

That is why I build LocalHero. It started in 2016 as a way to link local content to local people. It has become a platform that lets community organisations own what they depend on: their website, their members, their data, and increasingly their AI tools. Because a community that does not control its own infrastructure cannot govern itself.

Independence needs community, and community needs independence

I still dislike being told what to do by people I didn’t choose and can’t remove. But the cure for that was never isolation. It was building communities worth belonging to, and making sure they belong to their members.

The Greeks understood that the free individual and the self-governing community are one thing, not two. Online, we have forgotten it. We traded the assembly for the feed, and citizenship for a terms-of-service checkbox.

We can take it back. It starts one organisation, one community at a time.

Every community has behaviour that is legal but corrosive: the committee member who treats the organisation's money as their own, the volunteer who bullies newcomers until they leave, the member who harasses others and dares anyone to prove it. No law covers most of it, and no law should. For most of history it was handled by something more powerful than law: reputation. People cared what their community thought of them, and behaved accordingly.

I made this argument in 2000, in The thin veil of civilisation. Social norms, enforced by approval and disapproval, are the real glue of a society. Laws are the backstop.

That glue is weakening. Communities are larger, more anonymous and more transient. Someone can behave badly in one organisation and turn up fresh in the next, with a clean slate and a new set of targets. The tools communities now run on make it worse. Facebook groups and WhatsApp chats give organisers no memory and no standing: complaints vanish in a scroll, and the platform's rules, not the community's, decide what can be said.

Privacy matters

I take privacy seriously. People should control their own data, decide what is shared, and never be exposed on a whim. That principle is why I build member-owned infrastructure in the first place.

But privacy protects people from strangers, corporations and the state. It was never meant to protect people from the consequences of how they treat others. Privacy that means no one may ever say "this person did this, and it isn't acceptable" is not privacy. It is impunity.

Accountability done properly

Naming has to be done carefully or it becomes a mob. The rules that make it legitimate:

• Conduct, not character. What someone did, not who they are.
• Decided by those accountable, through a known process, not by whoever shouts loudest.
• A right of reply before anything is published.
• Proportionate and time-limited. Records expire. People can change.

Whether to go further and name people publicly is each community's call. I would, and I do. A community's duty doesn't end at its own boundary: if bad actors are quietly shown the door, they simply move on to the next organisation, which gets no warning. Keeping it private protects the offender, not the next victim. But I understand why others stop short of that, and a fair internal record is still far better than none.

Whichever you choose, the truth matters. Publish only what you can stand behind. Anyone named falsely has the law of defamation on their side, which is exactly as it should be.

Communities should own this

The point is not shaming for its own sake. It's that a community should be able to set its own standards and enforce them, on infrastructure it controls, under rules it writes. When the platform belongs to someone else, you get their rules and their priorities, and usually their silence. When it belongs to you, you can build accountability that is fair, transparent and answerable to members.

It's how I run Princes Park Touch, whose Hall of Shame is public, and it's what LocalHero is built to let any community do, publicly or not.

There has been a lot of discussion that WordPress is becoming less user friendly, and it has gained some traction: the upcoming WordPress 3.8 is aimed, amongst other things, at making the dashboard friendlier. I don’t think WordPress is becoming less user friendly. It has simply never been friendly to newcomers.

Where WordPress has dropped the ball is elsewhere. The sensible projects that would make it far better are not being tackled. Instead, development chases UI improvements and quick wins. Those are welcome, but a better platform would make them easier. Indeed, a better platform would let people build their own UI, making efforts like rolling MP6 into core moot, because developers would build their own dashboards through plugins.

Things like BackPress, post-to-post relationships in core, and cleaning up the ridiculous database schema are not being tackled. These projects would make WordPress a better CMS and a better blogging engine. But they are not on the roadmap.

You can bet WordPress’s competitors are tackling them.

Barnaby you wrote:

The evidence is against you here, as almost all known usage of webmention has been for short replies which don’t make sense without context.

Actually we aren’t disagreeing, maybe I didn’t express myself well when I wrote “At the moment of the method is built around a POSSE architecture. This works well for long form articles which can stand alone but address issues or ideas that are posted on an external website”.

What i meant to say is that Indieweb replies make no sense outside their context which makes it counterintuitive to be posting them and displaying them via POSSE. Of course it can be done (and I like the concept) but i doubt it will catch on. Whereas a long form artcicle replying to another doesn’t really need the context as it stands alone.

I agree that webmention is nicer than pingback and your work on the toolbelt is awesome.

With respect to my external comment idea, there is no security hole, most commenting systems allow commenting without logging in and it is up to server on whether it accepts the webmention of the comment posted. Finally like webmentions itself it is a chicken and an egg thing whether PESOS webmentions would catch on. Without modifying existing implemenations it won’t work. I’m slowly getting the hang of Github so I might fork Matthias’ plugin and build it myself if I find the time.

However thinking about the architecture of of webmentions I think they could be extended by becoming bidirectional. At the moment of the method is built around a POSSE architecture. This works well for long form articles which can stand alone but address issues or ideas that are posted on an external website. But if that is all there is to webmentions it is just a nicer implementation of Pingback.

More importantly though webmentions vision includes distributed commenting and it does succeed at making this possible, and members of the community are making use of this functionality. However the current workflow is awkward and i doubt it will catch on with the general public. Sophisticated Indieweb users can and will read an article on an external site and then return to their own to post a comment, but that king of behaviour is not intuitive.

But all is no lost as the webmention protocol could easily be implemented to support PESOS, which when commenting is more much natural. This is best explained by illustrating a use case namely:

A commenter (for this example me) arrives at external site, reads an article and wishes to make a comment. I make the comment on the external site and as part of making the comment I add my author url, that being the url of my own site. The external site then sends a webmention of the comment to my site. My own site could then scrapes my comment and saves a copy in my CMS. Otionall I could republish the comment in my blog or activity feed at my discretion. Thus fully implementing PESOS.

This article is hopefully also posted on IndieNews. Also mentioning Barnaby Walters for good order.