Meet Adrian and Lee, two of the people helping shape Bonfire's future. They are gifting group administrators who've been on the frontlines of the Buy Nothing movement, building community, fostering generosity, and fighting against Facebook's enshittification every step of the way.
They're co-designing the Mutual Aid Networks stretch goal with us, bringing years of lived experience into Bonfire's development.
In this video and in Adrian's writeup below they share their story, why this matters, and why we're building it together.
Support our crowdfunding campaign to make community-owned gifting infrastructure a reality.
The Gifting Movement #
I am an administrator of a gifting group, formerly known as “Buy Nothing” on the formerly tolerable “facebook”. We’re looking for a new home.
Buy Nothing was a grassroots movement that had millions of participants in thousands of groups across the world. In my suburb, 1 in 5 people are members of our local chapter’s facebook group, which exists for the sole purpose of either giving things away, or asking for things, from your neighbours. The movement has now forked into both a privately owned (somewhat buggy) app and a rebel alliance of facebook groups called “Gifting with Integrity” and other names.
Buy Nothing’s global success could be attributed to the context in which it was started, its thoughtful principles and its careful coordination. Facebook’s universal adoption and its built-in groups functionality made it technically easy to set up one of these communities and have the posts appear in people’s news feeds. People were already checking these, which made it a low barrier to entry. Buy Nothing groups emphasised that meeting new people; helping each other, being kind and respectful in the process; were all part of the goal. That was a new experience for many facebook users, who are used to the wild west of facebook Marketplace interactions. Facebook doesn’t really facilitate kindness and respect out of the box but the founders of Buy Nothing worked hard to build a kind-of open-source administrative control to circumvent facebook’s default of engineering for conflict.
A Movement's Secret Sauce #
The movement tapped into the unmistakable joy that comes from giving and sharing as well as the security we feel from getting our needs met by our community. It tapped into the longing for real, human connection that was coming from our increasing addiction to being online.
The group administrators are responsible for bringing the movement's principles from theory into action. Every group administrator who set up a Buy Nothing group was asked to complete the Buy Nothing training linked above. This included introducing ideas like: what is a gift economy; understanding the benefits of diversity; understanding the issues with consumerism, prejudice, privilege; and all the practicalities of starting a group. Group administrators were connected in regional and global chat groups, enabling them to solve problems together, share expertise and evolve new ideas to be incorporated into the training material. The result was the most progressive induction I had partaken in up to that moment.
Having a clear educational pathway makes it possible to replicate the successful elements of a group in new instances. The initial learning load is not a barrier to entry, but instead resonates with the people who have noticed the same issues it solves. They see it as a meaningful call to action which they are willing to put their energy behind. The power and privilege of administrating a group is given freely to anyone willing to endure this rewarding rite of passage.
Group administrators promote their group through their real-life social networks. Since they have such a good understanding of the movement’s principles, these are relayed with enthusiasm and passion. This gets passed through friends and friends-of-friends like a wave. The enthusiasm and passion exchanged is just not comparable to receiving a link from a stranger. If people know and trust the admins, this trust is also transferred into the group they create. This becomes an essential part of setting and propagating the culture. Everyone in the group is connected to everyone else, friends, family or neighbours and this affects how we interact with each other: with accountability and consideration (not like many other spaces of the internet, which are more like people who have crossed international borders to go on a bender without repercussions.)
Mutual Aid Movements v Capitalism #
As facebook has increasingly needed to deliver higher revenue to justify its share price, the quality of our news feeds has been in freefall, consisting mostly of paid content, devoid of truth and morality. Now it feels like our local gifting groups are being held hostage along with the other interest groups and communities. They all came to facebook because that's where the people were. Now the only reason people go on facebook is because that's where the groups are.
There have been a lot of attempts to make apps that take the gifting phenomenon out of facebook. None though seem to have achieved the cohesive, world spanning momentum of the original Buy Nothing groups. In the official Buy Nothing app, “Community Builders” (aka “Administrators”) are now considered optional extras, so anyone can start using the app in any area, at any time, regardless of whether someone has committed themselves to grow and nurture the movement there. The result is that people have an experience of turning up to a party with no one else there, one at a time. I guess Buy Nothing failed to replicate the success of Buy Nothing. Like many other tech startups, they might have thought it made business sense to engineer away the need for administrators, to reduce a perceived problem of work hours. But in doing so, they ignored the dynamics of a social movement: who’s going to promote the group now? Who’s going to take responsibility for the group’s direction? Who’s going to provide the feedback and new ideas? Sure they might keep trying to make AI grow a conscience and moderate every conversation in the world at once, but we love being moderators and we love our oceans at their current temperatures, so why introduce new problems for useless solutions?
Mutual Aid Unleashed #
Innovation should be targeted at real problems. The way existing commercial online marketplaces are set up, there is little consideration for the economy of movement. At any point in time, any person might decide they want something from literally anywhere and the result is traffic (and emissions). We also have a problem of people feeling the need to be glued to their phones in case they miss out on something. To address this in our groups we encourage people to wait a while before choosing who will receive their gift. If we had control of the underlying software, we could design our gifting platform to first expose gifts to nearby neighbours and increase the radius over time. This would introduce a natural delay in the likelihood of a gift being allocated, and help in strengthening nearby neighbourhood connections (reversing feelings of isolation). It would also reduce transport emissions by prioritising these localised interactions, while saving more distant interactions for more niche objects.
We can also be conscious about how our online communities affect our culture, which means we can decide together which of our expectations we want to keep and which don’t serve us well anymore. Should I expect, as people in my city do, that every 6 months, I can generate a pile of rubbish that is too big to go in my 240L bin (which I also expect to be emptied every week?) Should I expect that the council will take it, squash it and bury it? Should I expect that the only way this stuff is going to get recycled is by people driving around rummaging through the rubbish? Should I expect someone else to recover and repair our broken stuff? Should I expect there is a lower class to do this for me and that they should show gratitude for this honour? Or should I try to demonstrate that when I buy something, its existence is my responsibility, including when it is no longer useful to me. Are there things I just shouldn’t buy? Are there things that shouldn't be for sale in the first place?
When we have determined what our community’s principles or “rules” are, finding out about them shouldn’t be the same experience as encountering a big tech’s “terms of service”: large blocks of complicated text, cut off by a scroll bar, making room for a big “Agree” button that will make it all go away. These are designed for minimal engagement and minimal understanding to obfuscate rules that benefit one large company. Moderators and group administrators need to establish, learn, evolve and propagate community culture and if this is enhanced in our technology design, we will be rewarded with a safe, progressive and popular movement.
The cultural change that we are talking about amounts to a large reduction of material waste and a great improvement in mental health outcomes for our community. Had the costs otherwise fallen upon our state bodies, they would be exponentially greater than the cost of investing in development of open source software which can be deployed across many regions with similar issues to solve. Investing in community hosting collectives, is a far more economic proposition than corporate subscription solutions which not only cover running costs but investors' completely insatiable greed.
We are driven by a desire to see less unnecessary consumption, less trash, less traffic and less isolation. We want to see less misinformation and less of the corruption, suffering and inequality it enables. We want more input and more community connections. We see easy ways to influence all of these things by letting communities partake in designing and running their own communications platforms.
We want to connect with other gifting groups around the country and around the world about how they’re addressing similar issues. We want to collaborate with the local council and government bodies who see value in backing these community-led and community-owned initiatives. We’d love to hear from members of gifting communities about their thoughts on social media and how our groups should evolve in the future. We want to work with local, progressive tech people who are passionate about sustainable, community hosting and software. Let’s connect and build this together.
If you are part of a mutual aid or gifting community, get in touch with us to work together on the mutual aid stretch goal. Support our crowdfunding campaign to make community-owned gifting infrastructure a reality.
