🫧 socialcoding..Complete this sentence:
"I experience #fediverse as a .."
Bustling city
Cozy village
Ghost town
Other (please comment)
Poll ended at .
Johanna, CanCon varietyOther: loosely-bound meta-network of more tightly-bound community or topical networks.
I *describe my experience* using all kinds of analogies such as the other options in this poll.
That is a good, more matter of fact characterization to all the analogies indeed. Thank you.
What I particularly like in your definition, is that it makes clear that "fediverse" by itself indicates a pure technosphere. It enables social communication, and merely facilitates it. What people do on that channel, the way they communicate and how they interact with others then determines the social experience.
SX starts to consider a social experience from the most personal perspective, where a person has individual needs wrt their online participation. Then using the "Pyramid of perspective" this scale up to consider inter-personal relationships, and at the top of the pyramid and at the largest scale we shape the constructs of society together.
(Note that SX is a universal solution development methodology, even though it starts with a focus on social web and software development.)
See also: https://coding.social/blog/reimagine-social/#pyramid-of-perspective
Awesome!
I hope my response didn't come off snarky, as that wasn't how I meant it - at worst I intended to be a bit pedantic. And relatable analogies are *always* at my fingertips when talking to the inexperienced or "non-tech" social network users, for sure.
But *eventually* we need to draw people in to a little more media- and tech-literate understanding.
I'm bookmarking your blog post, thanks - this is a topic in my current academic modules and my hoped-for masters capstone
@johannab No, not at all snarky. 💕
What is so interesting is to discern between the technical and social, and I think that most people have a very functional-technical perspective of what it means to communicate online, so to say. Consider it merely as extra channels to interact with others, more choice to connect.
But of course our online social network is much more than merely a channel, and we have to 'project our social' somehow over these thin copper and fiberglass wires, while we try to make sense and interpret the social signals that come from other remote places.
I think we underestimate the impact of communicating online, and the narrow 'social bandwidth' that our current networking tools support. Then we translate online situations to how we would behave offline and get wrong expectations, misconceptions, and subequenctly miscommunications.
We are still all youngers online, still all learning the ropes, while we do social networking offline for 1,000's of years already.
@johannab I for my part are very happy you find this interesting. Addressing the social side is not the most popular among developer-heavy crowds :)
Feel welcome to participate in our matrix channels or forum. The latter serves as a note-taking tool, or - under SX definition - as a commons based prosperity vault, aggregating value over time as people leave their 2 cents.
Note the SX Mindfulness principle of Social coding commons.. the movement moves, or it pauses awaiting value aggregation by the next participant. Timeless. Everything hinges on proactive participation (and on the basis of intrinsic motivation following Hedonic peer production principles).
I am mentioning, as at the moment the movement is slow-moving, since I am looking for income to sustain my work in the commons. In other words I must let the SX Sustainability principle prevail now :)
Here a link to the core principles of Social experience design:
https://coding.social/blog/reimagine-social/#core-principles
that last line - that's exactly it. I've been mostly under-the-radar blogging my thinking on this again lately (having started making these observations in 1989-90).
My current interest is (re)connecting real-world, localizable communities and real-world Third Places, using digital social tools as *tools* for those human social networks to get their needs met.
This ramble a few months ago was one related thought: https://johannab.ca/theBlog/2025-10-07+More+%E2%80%9CDigital+Third+Space%E2%80%9D+Thoughts
Oww, that is interesting. See here what brought me to the #ActivityPub fediverse ages ago on IT timescales..
Read the blog post, and these are astute observation and valuable way of thinking about the networking environment, both offline as well as online, and how they interact together, how they intertwine. #SX envisions a peopleverse (which is a concept, not a name), a hypothetical space where the interaction is seamless and technology unobtrusively serves our day to day needs.
#PersonalSocialNetworking is a powerful instrument to design better social experiences.
Often the talk of the town in the #ActivityPub dev circles is about some feature or other, an app functionality and the extent to which it can be made interoperable. Technical implementation details dominate the discussion. And drama ensues on the broader #fediverse if social impact and other externalities are overlooked in an app design.
When comparing #microblogging we have today, it really is like sticky notes on the fridge, which fall off or are removed by people. And we project all communication modes onto them.
@smallcircles I very much think you and I have arrived at the same space, perhaps from different directions and with different vocabularies - I'm still very much learning how to communicate my terminologies and I hope it's OK that you've prompted me to shift into some of yours!
My paid-work background is +/- 30 years in "tech support", but much involved roles with titles related to "integration" , "deployment" and "client care". Good tools are made when we start with UX/SX and work back.
@smallcircles I'm now a (hopefully temporarily) unwaged grad student in an interdisciplinary urbanism/planning/systems program mashing that all up with community-first technology planning.
I have a seminar discussion tonight on a recently assigned "The Mayor's Brief" paper, and I took the approach of presenting and argument that Cities need to own their own social technology tools.
Remains to be seen how well I did that!
Totally! Cities should have their own tools. I find the whole #SmartCity trend to be dystopic #SurveillanceCapitalism driven, from what I've seen of it. Large corporations in the driver seat, plenty #BigTech, and a general 'drive for control' by technical means, rather than creating and evolving vibrant and safe living spaces by social means and encouragement of close participation of local residents in sustaining that.
It is hard to find sustenance to focus on the important applied R&D in the more social areas, with most #funding and support reserved for the cold hard tech side. While tech can only ever be supportive of "true social". It must address people's needs.
I'm biased but think its urgent to #fund initiatives like Social coding commons and #SX for fedi to stave off existential challenges. I approached @nlnet among others. Current #EU mandate by @EUCommission for @ngi results in a tech-first "code it and they will come", not a peopleverse.
@smallcircles Oh, yeah.
I follow Evan, and Julian, but those threads sometimes cause me to glaze over - I've never been "a coder".
That said, I just re-read that one and holy cow, I'm seeing lots of analogies to problems with the DICOM protocol which DID drive my tech services/deployments work for decades.
One of the hardest challenges in keeping a human patient's medical records in order, and secure, is that different stakeholders need different relational connection to different components
@smallcircles DICOM data structures get crazy twisted, because every element in a recordbase could potentially be the point which is seen as the "root" from which everything branches.
Radiologists view Images, which have attributes including the Study, the Order, and the Patient.
Clinical care delivery people need Reports, which derive from Studies but also include Orders and Patients as attributes.
Primary care physicians are concerned with Patients, who come with 1:n relationships with attributes such as Orders, Studies, Reports, referrals, results, diagnoses....
Patients don't give a shit about having any attributes at all, they want to feel better and get the hell away from anything to do with medical technology!
I can see AP being at least as ridiculous as DICOM, though social networking is probably slightly lower-stakes for most. 🤣
I think what you will find interesting, and what immediately leads to a sort of mindset shift - which is required to fully grasp the holistic approach that SX follows - is that SX defines #SocialNetworking as follows:
"Any direct or indirect human interaction between people."
Period. That's it. It encompasses that vast scope, which includes both our offline and online worlds (handy, to focus on that peopleverse).
A healthcare system is a complex mulitplayer environment, where many people in different stakeholder roles work with sensitive data. That is the technical perspective.
On the social side, it is a social network, for which you can apply SX as the evolutionary solution design methodology.
@smallcircles Absolutely.
I'm out of it now, but wow, it would be immensely beneficial for a patient to truly *own* their medical data lake and just exchange the relevant records when needed.
It would also be several lifetimes' work to do that correctly, I fear, and there are eleventy-million and one startups making their own wrongheaded attempts at it with "patient portals" and "AI health" and other such malwares.
Just start small and 🍀 evolve. A good example is the Netherlands where I live. In the 50s it was as car-heavy as any US state today, but by following a consistent policy we turned it into a bikers' paradise. And that is now an exemplar for other cities and even countries across the world. An export product :D
@smallcircles hahaha - your example appears somewhere in my world almost daily - urbanism studies, active transportation folks I follow, and in my fediverse-urbanism interconnections all the time.
It's amazing what we can transform if we get the entrenched and unimaginative status quo out of the way.