A Deliberative Social-Media App — Design Sketch

See the Habermas notes for orientation. This folder is a thought experiment: what would a social platform look like whose architecture is congruent with Habermas’s normative framework rather than perpendicular to it? It applies the diagnostic — especially refeudalization-1962, communicative-action, and the critiques on plural counterpublics — to concrete product decisions.

The point is not to design the perfect app but to use the framework as a directional compass. Each design move is derived from a Habermasian principle and each comes with a known tension or failure mode that the sketch acknowledges rather than hides.

Files in this folder

• rejections.md — what mainstream platform features Habermas’s framework rules out by construction. The negative list is most of the work.
• moves/ — eight first-principles design moves, each in its own file: topic-centred organisation, status-blind defaults, communicative-action affordances, federation for plural counterpublics, non-lord gatekeeping, reader-funded economics, algorithmic transparency, identity sovereignty.
• tensions.md — three structural tensions no design move solves.
• partial-existing-systems.md — what already approximates the sketch (Mastodon, Lobste.rs, Substack, Kialo, Discourse) and what’s missing.
• open-questions.md — four open design questions including the sharpest one (is “Habermas-inspired social media” a category mistake?).
• de-otio-fit.md — three buildable slices for De Otio and the recommendation that the framework is more useful as an evaluator than as a product spec.