Social Forks: Data, Apps, and DAOs

Sometimes communities grow apart. In the digital realm this often means finding new platforms to reconvene on, losing all of your data; the history, connections, and accounts that defined that community.

Holochain let’s communities split with their platforms intact.?

Forking Data

We’ve all become familiar with forking code. Whether through Github repositories or blockchains, we recognize that code can be copied, changed, and taken in new directions.?

But data can also be copied.

With Holochain, every user holds their own data and has access to all public data in a particular group, so it’s possible for a group of users to fork their community, application, or project with all of their data intact.?

Forking Applications

By example, imagine a Reddit-like application on Holochain where there are new moderators for a particular subreddit. These moderators start making a bunch of changes, and half of the community loves them, but half wants to maintain the old way of doing things. Either group can elect to fork the community, creating two separate subreddits. These are identical apart from name and membership. They both maintain all previous posts, comments, and settings. Members retain their badges, karma, and flair. From this point going forwards however, they are separate, and can begin acting independently.

Forking DAOs

It’s not a challenge to see how useful this is for DAOs.?

As organizations engaged in activity out in the world, from owning businesses and designing products or spaces to philanthropic activities and archiving, it’s important that when these communities diverge, all members can maintain the documentation that the DAO created.

As we have pointed to previously, DAOs can be built on Holochain applications providing the benefits of on-chain interactions like auditability to the everyday affairs of the DAO. Because the data of all of those activities is now also forkable, it allows DAOs to grow and evolve beyond their initial structure, without having to start from scratch.

Management of scarce resources like crypto wallets, or control of legal entities isn’t as simple. But the ability to easily fork communities opens up new governance possabilities not yet explored.?

Bridging Communities

Beyond forking communities, there is the possibility of bridging between them.

Consider the example of the subreddit we discussed. Perhaps one of the critical changes that split this community was the display of a new type of flair. This doesn’t affect the types of posts that show up in these subreddits. Thus, it’s possible for the communities (or even individual users) to choose to have posts from both communities displayed, with only that difference of the new flair showing in one and not another.?

This is a simple example of a bridge, but it’s illustrative of the ways that groups can operate in parallel, overlapping spheres that benefit each other while maintaining their differences. Because Holochain is built to give agency to users, each community member can have different views on these overlaps as they keep their feet planted in the various communities.?

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