In real-life anarchist groups, people struggle with social shunning.

1) the bad-doer does typical DARVO or other attempts to use social capital or friendship networks to prevent it. Their friends don't want to believe, evidence is difficult to come by.

Anarchists have various solutions for this: this is comparatively the easy part.

2) anarchist groups are local. The bad-doer just goes to a different local group within their travel distance. How to communicate reputation?

More difficult.

I suggest that this kind of experience happening to many people,, rather than FOSS ideology in particular, may be behind a lot of Mastodon's design and design problems. Even now, Bluesky (which remains a largely centralized system) is banning people for "living in Mississippi" or "being Palestinian".

For this reason decentralized social media designs become more similar to anarchist ones, with the ability to make central decisions limited.

@shotgunseamstress I see "always at square one in our understanding" as like, really critical to how the dominant way of being sustains itself, and I'm also frustrated by how it shapes what anarchism must be on the web, even Fediverse.

One thing I've been thinking about is that how anarchists talk about anarchy among themselves can often go on... all day without ever actually saying the word anarchism. Like, the vocabulary for "auto-communication" among people doing anarchy with themselves tends to be all, "help, care, plan, show up," and that doesn't really perform a brand the same way kyriarchal political thoughts train themselves to.