🫧 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.
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..
@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.