The strangest thing to me about our social tools and networks is how super-limited their feature-sets and philosophies have been in human terms.
It feels like designing a house entirely around the best use of new light-switch technology. How can we reinvent the bathmat???
It's weird.
@kissane so, I think one reason for this is that it's agonizing to build new social graphs.
It would be nice to build apps that do new things in different ways, but re-use our existing graphs.
Facebook Platform worked like this. You could build games, tools, or apps using the FB graph and identity. OpenSocial had a similar system, but built as an open standard.
This is why we built the ActivityPub API - to encourage this kind of client-side innovation. I'd like to see that used more here.
@evan @kissane I'm convinced that the "social graph" is at best a mirage, but in general a broken technological strut.
We have many contexts that we fluidly exist in; I don't "add a connection" to the person I buy coffee from, but they might be or become a good friend, one I might later drift away from.
Reifying these dynamics is something that benefits entities like Facebook, but all *we* need are ways to communicate with eachother.
@evan @kissane I've been thinking a lot about how so many of the formerly public groups have moved to private ad-hoc spaces on WhatsApp, Signal, etc – but with vastly more limited interfaces. I don't have an Apple phone, but I understand Apple's photo sharing works similarly.
What's the ["rich media", adaptive space] ActivityPub or Bluesky or [protocol] equivalent of private group chats, where we have a thousand ephemeral micro-graphs, rather than a few big and relatively static ones?
One of the benefits of the big corporate social graphs is that sign on via them provides an email address, which is crucial for many applications, especially the subscription-based indie economy where lots of experiments are happening in community building. E.g. can someone sign up to a newsletter using an ActivityPub related account?
Is there something I'm missing in ActivityPub that makes that part of one's social graph shareable? Ditto for phone numbers per Blaine
Erin Kissane
Evan Prodromou
blaine
Ryan Singel