I'm a designer and developer with 15+ years of professional experience and I would absolutely agree culture is more important than code.

I won't go as far to say as coding is easy, because it isn't. The effort it takes to create a platform is considerable. It's why we don't have that many options when it comes to social media.

But culture? That's HARD. Fostering an environment that's open and inclusive and limits abuse? That's so much more difficult.

I'm a context guy, so in attempting to explain why it is so difficult, you have to look at the social context of tech, which isn't the most inviting place to begin with if you're not white, straight and a dude.

Combine this with economic inequality factors and it makes that much more difficult for non white people and women to even start building anything.

So you generally get white guys building platforms for ALL of us.

A culture that favors their perspectives.

@Are0h an interesting implication from creating culture from code is the way that code has built-in hierarchies and levels that make no sense on a community level. Let's take masto as an example!

- The person who setup an instance is its admin, in a technical sense
- a technical admin is *also* the most powerful "institution" — simply due to the power of execution "vested" in them
- the admin can delegate some their power (while keeping all of it!) to moderators — they chose!

@Are0h this means that the builders are the mayors, whether they want to, or are capable of being mayors.
and, again, regardless of their capabilities, they chose other officers to execute their policies

now, given what we know from tech, the builders are not the most socially capable…
…and even so, what we know from social sciences, they will still chose moderators who are close to them (and probably equally socially capable…)