What is the Website League?
The Website League is an "island network:" a set of small social media websites, connected to each other, and as a whole disconnected from other large federated systems.
How does it work, in a social sense?
Individual instances are run by volunteers, and their rules are based on a single core set of rules, derived from the community guidelines of Cohost, a social network many of our users enjoyed.
Moderators, instance administrators, and other users with expertise or valuable perspectives are part of a central decision-making body. This group works to find consensus on larger-scale issues, assist each other with moderation and administration workloads, maintain the allowlist, and resolve issues raised by users. League planning, rulemaking, and operation will be by consensus, and individual instance moderators and administrators will manage their own small communities.
Instances wishing to join the League will be reviewed and voted on by this governing body.
How does it work, in a technical sense?
The software used to run a League instance is anything that is both compatible with the ActivityPub federation protocol, and supports allowlist mode federation, which federates only with an approved list of websites. (Currently, this does not include Mastodon, as it does not function correctly for League use in allowlist mode; this is likely to change in the future.)
Anyone can set up an instance, whether it's for themselves, their friends, a subject-specific audience, or general use. Admission to the League will result in this instance being added to the centrally managed allowlist, to link it to all other instances.
How does it relate to the Fediverse and Mastodon?
The Website League is structured to function completely independently of the Fediverse, the largest collection of federated social media sites (which is mostly made up of Mastodon instances).
Single instances may choose to federate with both networks, but we only recommend this for single-user or private instances; users on such an instance must be aware that their posts will be seen by two separate bodies of people, with different cultures.
Why not just join the Fediverse?
Many of our users were or are users of the Fediverse; some had unpleasant experiences there in the past and would prefer to avoid it. The Website League is meant to provide a separate federated space with a cohesive, central set of community guidelines shared by all instances, which is something impossible in the Fediverse.
In addition, all League member sites must, as much as possible, disable features out of their sites that drive unhealthy engagement with social media, and which cause conflicts to escalate out of control and embroil entire instances or the network as a whole. This means no federated timelines and no metrics shown on posts.
What is your governing philosophy?
We will, as best we can, work according to the Zapatista principles of good governance. These are:
- to serve others, not ourselves;
- to represent, not supplant;
- to build, not destroy;
- to obey, not command;
- to propose, not impose;
- to convince, not defeat;
- and to go below [and listen to our users], not above [toward the accumulation of power as a group].
My political beliefs skew to the right. Can I participate?
No.
