What GNU Social/Mastodon may afford is a decoupling of network application from network effect. In particular, Mastodon builds on the network effects set down by GNU Social, in the same way that gmail and MS Outlook build on the network effects of SMTP.

This means that the network application instances can diverge, in how they model and render the underlying network, how they integrate and leverage tools and tooling, so to present different use cases for participants.

One defining property of our prevailing model of "spaces" is that of embodied membership. An individual is either "in" a space or not. A "space" is understood as a container within which some things are and other things are not.

The fraughtness of this model is already evident to anyone who ever described idiomatically as "having a foot in both camps".

Nonetheless, this spatialization of membership if familiar and easily reduces to a logic of truth values, a point we shall return to.

Yet our world is full of cases where embodied membership is an inadequate explanatory device. Consider a person born to parents of different socially constructed racial categories. Is this person a member of one category or the other? Both? This is quite too simplistic a question.

Indeed, how their memberships manifest on a census questionnaire may differ from how they manifest at a family reunion from how they manifest during a workplace interaction. It's not a universal "am" or "am not".

We can't save embodied membership as an explanatory device here—by resorting to the kludge of "feet in both camps"—because biraciality (or indeed, race, qua race) doesn't play out the same way being, say, both a member of the varsity football team and a member of glee club does.

There are no sign up sheets that definitively determines across all social encounters that one "is" a member of one social construct or the other or both. Membership, here, can't be reduced to values of "T" and "F".

This is a conceptual frame that many white people (and, especially, white men) may struggle with. There may not be sign up sheets, but there are hegemonic social conventions that define certain memberships as givens.

But conventions are always anchored in a model. And the model, here, is simply inadequate, no matter how well it may serve some. It is inadequate in society, and are likewise inadequate as a basis for social media technology. Yet here we are, using the same fundamental model.

Quite simply, our model of "spaces"—the basis around which our social technology is organized—insofar as spaces manifest through embodied membership, is inadequate to describe the fraughtness of social reality.

What if we, instead, conceived membership not as an expression of a state machine, but as a bundle of affinities and exceptions, which play out within and between interrelated membership bundles? Provisionally, let's refer to this conception of bundles as "intersectional membership".

What if our social technologies were built from a model (or models) where such intersectional membership was a fundamental property?

Mastodon, thus far, is not modeled on intersectional membership. Indeed, stated aims and intentions of the community notwithstanding, both the implementation and the ethos of Mastodon would seem to proliferate embodied membership within the context of the same commonly accepted "spaces" model as previous social media technologies.

William Shatner is or is not on Mastodon. I am or am not on a given instance. You are or are not someone I follow. I am or am not someone you follow. Individuals of certain political leanings are or are not encouraged to join. At some point, instances and individuals will or will not be listed on a whitelist, or a blacklist, or a greylist.

All easily reducible to truth values. All as easily worked out as is the assertion "You have paid your annual membership dues to the Audubon Society."

Now some will interject, at this point, that this is a function of social networks being run on computers. Computers are binary, goes the common sense argument, so of course our computerized representations, our models, will be binary.

Only, that same mechanism, binary representation, is used every day to represent floating point numbers of arbitrary precision and to represent so-called "enumerations" of terms that reduce to numerical representation only as an implementation detail.

It isn't that our computers are binary, but that our model—a model that worked just as well for the Massachusetts Audubon Society in 1896 as it did for Twitter in 2006—is founded on a property of embodied membership.

This property of embodied membership, in turn, depends in its modern expression on a representational system formalized by George Boole in the 19th century, although the model has been with us informally since well before then. Ingroup/outgroup long predates symbolic algebra.

So the question is, how might we begin to rethink the model of "spaces" that we so take for granted?

Can we imagine models of sociality with properties of membership that don't reduce in the same way as does embodied membership, to mere truth values? Can we conceive a non-spatial social media?

How would we go about designing social technology grounded in such alternate models? How would our tools/languages need to change to support this? How might the use cases of such applications play out?

@beadsland It was a revelation to me when itunes used tagging to organize music, rather than the rigid folder structure I'd had with my collection in winamp.

Breaking identity down into an ambiguous, ever-shifting collection of 'tags', rather than a rigid codified hierarchy, would go a long way towards this end.

How does that look, in social media?

@mykola As for how this looks in social media: We already have a tags system in the form of hashtags, but that's static, fixed in amber with the authorship of a post. "Lists" are sometimes used hackily as second-hand tags.

What if instead we had folksonomic tagging, where individuals could not only "boost" but mark posts with their own tags, and even second the tags of others? Each post might accrue a tag cloud as group commentary: a collectively aggregated marginalia.