A response to the Eve interview and the cognitive case for small communities
Danny’s recent piece on why everyone’s angry online is one of the best things I’ve read this year. If you haven’t read it, the core argument is elegant: your brain can hold about seven chunks of information at once (Miller’s 7±2), and everything about modern platforms — tiny phone screens, algorithmic feeds, communication with strangers who don’t share your mental libraries — forces those chunks smaller and smaller until you’re spending all your cognitive bandwidth on navigation and defensiveness instead of actual thinking. Communication breaks down not because people are stupid or mean, but because the infrastructure is designed against how human cognition actually works.
The Eve interview picks up from there: what if we built communication infrastructure that works with human constraints instead of against them? Small communities below Dunbar’s number. Proper threading. No algorithmic feeds. End-to-end encryption. Self-sovereignty. Invite-only trust networks with reputation staked on vouching. It’s a compelling answer, and I’m genuinely excited about it.
But there’s a moment in Danny’s piece where he almost names the next problem and then swerves. He mentions FidoNet and UseNet — systems where small BBSes started federating, sharing messages across communities while keeping their local identity. He calls it “the dream.” Then he drops it and pivots to the venture capital critique.
That federation layer — the coordination between sovereign communities — is the hard problem nobody’s developing. And it’s where everything either succeeds or quietly dies.
Decentralization Isn’t Distribution
“What if we didn’t scale?” is a clean line. For any single community, it’s the right answer. But the world’s problems do scale. Climate, food systems, governance, economic coordination — none of these get solved by a few hundred sovereign communities that can’t talk to each other.
Decentralization means no single point of control. Good. Necessary. But decentralization without coordination gives you an archipelago — islands that are individually healthy but collectively inert. Distribution means active coordination infrastructure: communities that overlap, share resources, translate between each other’s contexts, and do the meta-work of aligning without collapsing into centralization.
This is a genuinely different problem from what Eve solves. Eve builds the island. Distribution builds the bridges and shipping lanes — without putting a tollbooth operator in charge of all of them.
The Tension Is the Feature
Here’s what I don’t want to do: critique Eve for not being something it isn’t trying to be. The tension between “stay small and sovereign” and “coordinate across boundaries at scale” isn’t a flaw in Eve’s design. It’s the developmental edge — the place where the real work is.
Any coordination framework that tries to bridge sovereign communities faces a design constraint I think is genuinely underappreciated: it has to be able to accommodate other systems without assimilating them. Any meta-framework worth its name has to be able to subdue itself into another system — to be hosted by someone else’s logic — not just host everything inside its own. The moment a coordination layer starts imposing its structure on the communities it connects, you’ve re-centralized with extra steps.
This is harder than it sounds, and I think it’s why most federation attempts either stall out or drift back toward centralization. The instinct is always to standardize — pick one protocol, one governance model, one set of tools. But sovereign communities will have different values, different tools, different ways of organizing. The coordination layer has to hold that plurality without either flattening it or drowning in it.
We Don’t Have the Vocabulary Yet
This connects to something I think is one of the least-discussed obstacles to scaling decentralized communities: we don’t have a shared language for navigating between competing moral and organizational frameworks.
I use the term aMorality for this — the ‘a’ signaling “not-yet-ordered,” the space before moral frameworks harden into positions. It’s not immorality and it’s not amorality in the casual sense. It’s a governance-level stance: mediating between frameworks without privileging any of them. Think of it as the diplomatic grammar for communities that need to coordinate across genuine value differences — not by pretending those differences don’t exist, and not by finding the lowest common denominator, but by building consent-based spaces where real disagreement can be productive.
Danny’s codec metaphor actually points directly at this problem without naming it. Incompatible decoders — people chunking the world differently — is exactly what you hit when sovereign communities try to coordinate. The solution isn’t to force everyone onto the same codec. It’s to build translation protocols that respect the differences.
And this requires something uncomfortable for a lot of community-building spaces: genuine truth-seeking. Not places where we comb each other’s hair and talk about how pretty we are. Spaces where tensions are valued as developmental material, where disagreement is a feature, where the goal is understanding across difference rather than the comfort of shared assumptions.
Chapter 0: The Unglamorous First Step
So what does this actually look like in practice?
Before the grand vision of federated sovereign communities coordinating at global scale, there’s a mundane prerequisite that nobody wants to talk about because it’s not exciting: get on video, agree on a shared toolkit, onboard people.
Seriously. The first real work is agreeing on common tools — an office suite like Nextcloud, mindmapping like draw.io, web annotation like Scrible, video conferencing, and a communication platform like Eve — then actually getting people competent with them. Team leads and project managers can carry case-by-case adoption from there, but the shared foundation has to exist first.
The goal isn’t just digital collaboration. It’s building the capacity to cross platforms and move fluidly across domains — digital, tangible, cognitive. Build presentations that groups can show to other groups, to investors, to local councils. Make the work legible outside the communities that produce it. That’s what turns sovereign communities from interesting experiments into actual infrastructure.
I call this the “as it happens” principle: you can’t pre-specify the coordination layer from above. It has to develop through participation — through communities actually trying to work together and discovering what they need. But you can prepare the conditions. Shared tools. Shared onboarding. A willingness to meet in real time and build a real agenda.
The Stakes
Without distributed coordination, platforms like Eve risk becoming a culty novelty. Maybe a few hundred thousand users. Genuinely good communities — but communities that never connect, never compound, never reach the scale where they can actually challenge the systems Danny so accurately diagnosed as broken. Possibly even a kind of escapism — sovereign digital gardens where people who are already pretty aligned hang out and feel good about opting out, while the world’s actual coordination problems remain unsolved.
The potential, though — and this is real, not utopian hand-waving — is that small sovereign communities with proper coordination infrastructure could be the actual alternative to both centralized platforms and isolated archipelagos. Not by scaling up, but by distributing out. Communities of communities, doing the meta-work that human societies have always done — but usually in the shadows, and usually captured by whoever happened to build the bridge first.
The work is to do that transparently, with consent, with shared tools and shared language for navigating difference. Eve is one essential piece. The coordination layer is the next chapter.
And the chapter before that — Chapter 0 — is getting on a call and agreeing on where to start.