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.
Like, there are near-infinite and vastly more interesting ways to think about social systems and cultural patterns!
And the biggest recent departure from the deadly boring norm was literally "upload a picture, but only when your phone tells you to"
Anyway, this has obviously turned into my Main Thing for a minute, which is fine, I'll get back to bones later.
I linked to it in my most recent blog post, but reading @bkeegan & co's paper alongside a deep-ish dive on Ostrom has been really fruitful.
"This Place Does What It Was Built For": Designing Digital Institutions for Participatory Change
@kissane Thank you for articulating this. Big centralized systems monopolize innovation and experimentation.
I am optimistic about mastodon and the like because of the opportunity for alternative design approaches. Why does everything have to be in a *feed*?
I've been experimenting with browser extensions that use my corpus of thousands of bookmarks as a database to explore, ala stumbleupon.
@kissane Good stuff. The death of Twitter has got me thinking about this. Twitter was always so basic!
But I think one of the challenges is that social behavior is so rich and complicated that humans will channel richness into a basic text box much more effectively than developers can create rich tooling that really meets people where they are.
Not to say people shouldn't try. But I think there's a big uncanny valley between pretty basic tools and ones that really show an understanding of human socialization. And that's before we get to how much people's implied purposes differ from their self-narratives. Or the extent to which power is not only unexpressed, but socially inexpressible.
@williampietri Maybe! I would have said that awhile back, for sure.
But I think it's the difference in being like "we just invented rooms with lots of chairs! have fun!" and then hot-gluing on increasingly baroque layers of global-level curation and moderation when a billion people arrive
vs building something that can either specifically serve (or be adapted to suit) uses as different as voting locations, ceramics workshops, town halls, Kindergarten classes, AA meetings, and strip clubs
@williampietri so less about, like, Clippy and more about things like gradients of intimacy vs. gradients of visibility (but for maybe a dozen major factors)
a lot of this stuff won't matter all that much at the protocols-and-pipes level, although some will, but they matter a lot at the feature-design level
@kissane I hope so. I look forward to people succeeding here in ways that I didn't see coming.
But I think your physical architecture analogy helps illuminate the difficulty. A big room and a bunch of folding chairs can work for a lot of things. But the really good spaces are generally specialized in very thoughtful and usually expensive ways via a lot of expert labor. Which cuts against the sort of broad usage I think we both want.
I hope it's possible to find ways for virtual socialization that break that constraint, especially at scale. But I'll be pretty skeptical given the decades of past failures.
@williampietri Actually that brings up my big question, which is who has tried this stuff (socially skillful feature design) earnestly and at scale and failed? That seems like a good starting point.
Also, I think I'm not being clear—I don't think most of this stuff is about getting away from text boxes, it's about applying a lot more EQ to how we assemble them and what we build around them. I think eg Meta has done of ton of work on this, but their goals are ultimately antisocial.
Some platforms ... are almost entirely moderated by dedicated volunteer labor
As you note a few of those platforms are just now subject to strikes from that very pool of labour 😀
I think underpinning all of this is a much bigger discussion we do need to have about how we actually do participate. People currently carry a lot of default assumptions about online social spaces:
The assumptions are all technically wrong. These things have never been free, and often they've been funded at a real deficit. That's why they keep dying every decade or so.
But they've also been moderated semi randomly and with very different legal and governance frameworks. And sometimes just tyrants.
Most humans don't know these things. They'll need to.
@gvwilson It is SO WEIRD to me. Like we know this stuff offline, but put it on the internet and it's either a hyper-specialist Web Forum or a platform that is trying to do everything by doing almost nothing.
Dating apps are pretty much the sole exception, presumably because there's a lot of money lying on the ground there.
@kissane @gvwilson for some reason I had never seen the 50 techniques book. That's awesome.
But yeah, I've noticed this too. I think it might have something to do with monetization? Like we found *one* way to monetize things (ads and data) and ran it into the ground and absolutely refused to innovate on that and consequently refused to innovate on anything else like they're somehow related...??
It's bizarre. There might not be a correlation there, but it feels like there is, imo.
@fraying @kissane for me the Amazon book rec engine, which seemed from the outside to be about popularity, recency, & similarity...& therefore worked ok for books... is in some ways the deepest one.
once you add commerce onto that you get competition as well.
& the idea that popularity among connections or recency is necessarily a good proxy for salience to me is *extremely* tenuous imo. but it underlies the entire ad-driven & ad-driven-derived internet
@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 Ummm, yes, that’s why I was asking for thoughts, as in “more thoughts”, specifically around its apparent lack of relatively common use.
If you thought I was being snarky or inflammatory, you’re wrong, genuinely ignorant and curious, and this seemed like a perfect time to ask an expert about this given the context.
Is it actually used more than people realise? Why/why not? Anything being done about it? Is it too late with mastodons dominance? What’s it like? Do people dis-/like it?
I also spent a lot of time working with the Facebook graph and OpenSocial in the early days (2007-2011). It was useful as both a form of ID and a ready-made social graph.
But it inherently suffered from a lot of conflicted interests issues and technical complexity. Remember the scoped ID rollout?
My digital ID and my social graph should be separate from the apps that I use. But there's no money in providing those two things unless it's under the guise of an app...
@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
@kissane Not sure if you're looking for a job - but, if so, just copy paste this post as the cover letter for this one
@kissane This is a good blog post, I agree with you especially against, basically, tech solutionism. We can't just have the right tech, we also need the right governance model (and that's actually a bootstrapping process, we can't have the right tech without considering governance at all).
A French activist, @[email protected], wrote this French-speaking blog post: ““What do we need for XXX?” “Free software!” No, an ethical form of governance!” https://blog.imirhil.fr/2017/02/21/logiciel-libre-gouvernance-ethique.html
I'd also like to point you to https://bonfirenetworks.org @bonfire. I'm very excited about this project, it's basically a modular ActivityPub server (coded in Elixir) co-funded by one of @SocialCoop's co-funders, @mayel, built to be a common, as accessible as possible (IMHO in terms of economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984)). I found your publication lacked examples of “social forms”, and Bonfire provides/will provide a few: tasks creation and assignment, an inventory system (i.e. a decentralized system to sell goods and services), an events system, etc. To be honest, Facebook promised to be amazing, and journalists bought it, because they wouldn't think about criticizing their bosses' other businesses. Well Bonfire will be what Facebook never was, and it will be a decentralized, no-strings-attached, modular platform that will let developers write any affordance they'd like. For example I'm dreaming of an ActivityPub-over-Tor federation extension, i.e. federation between standard DNS-located servers, and hidden services.
Honestly I think that the internet is about as revolutionary as the printer and that we're witnessing an exhaustion effort to prevent neokings from being beheaded. Bonfire is bringing us closer to it, hopefully not to a violent revolution, but to a dialectic (overtaking?) of the workers-bosses relationships, through collaboration and cooperatives.
Bibliography:
Bourdieu, Pierre (1984): “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste”
@oceane @bonfire @SocialCoop @mayel Merci beaucoup à tous, Océane!
I hope to write more about social forms—probably too much—in future posts, and I love the idea of @bonfire. I really do think that if we make a healthy new generation of tools, they have to begin with governance both of the tools and of the institutions be build to support all the human labor that makes them work.
@kissane @bonfire @SocialCoop @mayel @bonfire
Hi, I've just found this blog post (on the Bonfire beta 😅 via @chobeat): “Fractal Software for Fractal Futures” https://fossil-milk-962.notion.site/Fractal-Software-for-Fractal-Futures-71e515597d6b424c994cae74f3341521.
Its introduction seems to describe Emacs: steep learning curve, powerful, hackable, keeping ADHD under control, etc. It's also quite verbose: for example Irreal [1] strives to make 400-500 characters blog posts and I'm trying to follow their example whenever I can.
There's especially this part that made me think you might wish to read it:
> Anthony Stafford Beer, outstanding cyberneticians, designer of Cybersyn and pioneer of modern organizational science criticized already in the 70s how computers were used exclusively to make old, manual processes and organizations go faster, instead of adapting organizations to the potential of digital tools. Fifty years later, have we really changed our approach?
Most digital systems are engineered. Some, though, are discovered, because they are based on the laws of the physical world, on some established structure in our brain, or on our social structures. One such case seems to be Notion, a popular software that keeps growing its user base. Notion can be used for personal note-taking, small and large-scale project management, no-code development, and content publication. Some people even use it to keep ADHD under control. It’s a productivity tool, a knowledge base tool, and a publication platform. Once a user moves past its beginner learning curve, albeit steep, Notion proves to be a powerful instrument, with most of its users adopting it to fit their work needs and even in their personal life.
Emceenoesis
Erin Kissane
Jon (now at neuromatch.social)
M.S. Bellows, Jr.
Olamina Free
infinite love ⴳ
shiva
William Pietri
Gaëtan Perrault
forvrin
Greg Wilson
Hazel Weakly
Cyd Harrell
Derek Powazek 🐐
Luis Villa
Evan Prodromou
maegul
blaine
Ryan Singel
Jupiter Rowland
Dave Winer ☕️
Les Orchard
Henkjan Schrijver
Massaging the Medium
Océane ⏚
Paul Houle