What is the secret of this project’s longevity?

DDH: The main secret is rather simple: Kyberia is one of the most ancient platforms. It emerged before cyberspace was partitioned by the big corporate players. It attracted particular users (Slovak and Czech hackers, artists, scientists) before Facebook, Twitter, or G+ even existed. For many of these users, Kyberia was the first digital community or social network they were ever integrated into. Such a “loss of virtual virginity” could, in the minds of these users, create a lasting imprint, a kind of habitus that causes this “community kernel” to appear and reappear—either on a regular basis or after shorter or longer pauses.

In the current era, when cyberspace is already partitioned and its participants’ habits are fixed, it is almost impossible to establish such an intimate relationship between a user and a new “startup” project. Today, any project is just one among thousands of others, and any domain is merely a point of little significance in an almost infinite digital space.

However, there are other reasons for Kyberia’s longevity as well. Kyberia does not harass its users with advertisements, implicit business models, legal licenses, or other corporate clutter. It’s not a megapolis like Facebook but rather a kind of cybernetic village. This does not mean it is any less meme-virally insane than Facebook; it just means that in its “virtual insanity,” it is still more intimate, personal, and human. The fact that new users must pass through a registration procedure makes it harder for toxic egos and propaganda bots to infiltrate. As a result, the community seems more resilient to external disturbances.

For nearly 10 years, Kyberia has been in a state of slow, unfolding homeostasis that is neither pure progress nor pure decay—something in the middle: Life, perhaps.

Lastly, the community has demonstrated a capacity to reproduce. In a sort of virtual endogamy, a significant number of Kyberia members have had children with other Kyberia members. It is reasonable to expect that old IDs will, sooner or later, be passed down to their progeny. As Kyberia has existed for nearly 15 years, another 10 years would bring it to the 25-year mark, considered a single human generation. Only if we surpass this threshold can we begin to speak of a “secret of longevity.”

You say it is a “social body with a collective identity.” What are the implications of such an approach for the community/members?

DDH: It is about a bi-directional flow of information between the whole (the community) and its parts (the members). The more feedback loops you have in the system, the more complexity will emerge from it. I intuitively implemented this principle into the architecture of the system long before I knew anything about graph theory, complexity, or A.I.

Later, there was a tendency to operationalize this intuition in scripts implementing the Parallel Democracy Model (PDM). Ideally, PDM could allow users to directly influence many of Kyberia’s global parameters—such as immigration rates, the number of new Ks generated and distributed, and ostracization thresholds—via a simple voting process aggregated in an innovative way. The goal is for the system to adapt swiftly to emerging challenges, but to do so fundamentally in a bottom-up manner: netizens should decide, not a caste of administrators.

Unfortunately, not many members are willing or ready to constructively participate in building a shared cathedral. It is much easier to criticize those “up there” than to recognize that those “up there” are, in fact, “we here.” With that recognition comes the responsibility to make decisions and perform courageous actions.

What are your visions for the project?

DDH:
0) To protect its existence and its raison d'être, which is to “protect diversity in cyberspace.”

To integrate our own state-of-the-art natural language processing semantic search engine.

To become more distributed, more decentralized, and to replicate into Czech, German, and potentially other regions of European cyberspace.

To use Kyberia’s database—or a specific subset of it—to train a collective artificial intelligence representing the mind of Slovak intelligentsia during the first decades of the third millennium.