Honest Tensions

See folder README for orientation. The sketch in this folder is not a coherent product as stated. Three tensions in particular.

1. Deliberation is slow; attention is fast. Every design move toward deliberation reduces feedback speed. Users have been trained for years on instantaneous response. A deliberative platform competes against a substrate of expectations it cannot meet on its own terms — only by changing what users want from a platform.

2. Plurality and shared discourse are in tension. Federation produces plural publics; a single deliberative space produces shared reference. Both are Habermasian goods. The architecture has to choose, or find a hybrid (federated by community, shared at some higher layer for cross-community discourse). Every existing fediverse implementation has bumped into this and none have solved it.

3. The economic model is unsolved. Reader-funded works at small scale (a single community subscription, a single newsletter) and breaks at platform scale (no one wants twenty subscriptions). Cooperative ownership is the structurally honest answer and the operationally hardest. Open-source-and-self-host is honest about cost-shifting (the cost is borne by whoever runs the instance, often unsustainably).

These are not solved by more careful design. They are open problems in the field.