Continuing work on the Artifact.
I read more through Order from Chaos. The idea of architectural control appeals to me in its elegance, but I can’t help but feel like I would be losing out on the ability to communicate norms and standards directly. To some extent, I realize, that’s the whole point–let the architecture of the system serve as the means to create boundaries for group member participation, rather than working on normative control or managerial control.
Regardless, as a practical matter, I don’t think architectural control is going to be present in this Artifact. First, I don’t think this is a good fit for the community I have in mind! We’re tied to a physical event, where people need to know how to behave as hosts and how to perform their tasks effectively. Constraining behavior through the architecture of a digital environment is not going to be sufficient. Second, if it can be used effectively, it would need a lot more time and thought to puzzle out. Particularly since I’m not 100% on how I would even begin to translate that structure into something that also works in meatspace. Third, there’s the simple fact that this particular community does remain (by necessity!) attached to an actual non-profit corporation. It would take quite a bit of… creative restructuring for the corporation to run events through a community that officially has no leadership at all. For the non-profit, there needs to be somebody officially in charge to whom authority can be delegated!
More of my time has been spent pursuing the idea of bridging Telegram and Discord. Both Telegram and Discord have bots, but I don’t have a solid understanding of the “plumbing” of either service, frankly. That said, after doing some digging and investigation, I was able to find a bot that’s intended to do exactly this–bridging Telegram and Discord. Perhaps fittingly, it’s named TediCross. (Cross-posting between “Te”legram and “Di”scord. Honestly, it’s the kind of name I would come up with, too!)
Now… it uses Nodejs. Because of course it does. I dislike Nodejs mostly because it has its own package manager. (The same way and reasons I dislike Python, for that matter.) This is a bit of a detour, but I dislike having multiple package managers doing things all on their own in a system. In Ubuntu, if you want to update pip… how do you do that? You can have one version installed by the system package manager… you’re prompted to update it, though. Okay, how? Do you have to be root? Does that do the system-level pip, or the user-level pip? Does that overwrite or break the system package? Or does it just leave it a mess? Now repeat that for most of your other packages, and I can confirm that yes, it is a mess. Any time I do anything with Nodejs or Python, I essentially have to configure a virtual machine just for that one task, to make sure it can’t contaminate anything else, and then bury it when that task is done. Contrast this with PHP, where I can just fetch the modules I want using the system package manager, or otherwise do the install myself, and there’s no messing around with separate package managers or supply-chain attacks. (Yes, I am opinionated.)
ANYWAY, I thought I’d give TediCross a try. I mean, I like the name, and it looks like it should do what I’m aiming for. I decided to run Nodejs on my Windows desktop, and I started with the standalone ZIP file. I also downloaded the TediCross stable release as a ZIP file. Then I tried to run them.
Hoo boy. Well, there’s a bunch of errors. Some of it honestly looks like the commands for NPM or other Node programs just weren’t being interpreted correctly. Right, well… fine then. I downloaded the proper installer for Nodejs and ran that. The install is relatively smooth, but then it also needs to install Chocolatey and a bunch of other stuff because some of Node’s libraries actually have to be compiled natively. Doubtless this is what was making such a hash of things before? So I do that, including waiting for Visual Studio and all the other components to come down. Even reboot my desktop.
Aaaaaand… nope. Still have a pile of errors, though the errors have changed now that the libraries can actually be compiled. I fiddled with that for a while, before deciding that maybe I should try the dev version instead of the actual stable release. This got me a LOT further, and I now have a version of TediCross that I can run on my Windows desktop. Might be a little rough around the edges, but as a proof of concept for the Artifact, I think we’re getting somewhere.
I’ve created a Telegram bot before (not successfully, but hey), so I’m at least somewhat familiar with the @BotFather. But I’ve never created a bot with Discord, so I feel like I’ll probably take that side of it a little slower, just to make sure I understand what’s being created and what needs to be set in order for this to work…
References:
Massa, F. G., & O’Mahony, S. (2021). Order from chaos: How networked activists self-organize by creating a participation architecture. Administrative Science Quarterly, 66(4), 1037-1083. https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392211008880
Sabathil, L. (n.d.). TediCross. GitHub. Retrieved July 13, 2025, from https://github.com/TediCross/TediCross
Leave a Reply