Complete this sentence:

@johannab

That is a good, more matter of fact characterization to all the analogies indeed. Thank you.

@johannab

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

@smallcircles

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

#SX #SocialCoding #SocialWeb #ActivityPub

What no one has remarked thus far, is that this #poll has a serious flaw. Sure, if you're in a village or city you can find roads and highways that lead you to answer the question above.

But if you are in a Ghost Town out in the wilderness, the poll likely won't pass by your timeline. And warp the outcome of this little #fediverse survey.

Boosts are appreciated so the poll has more chance to find the outer reaches of our fedi universe.

@smallcircles As a mildly annoying social network website, and thanks to the rising number of polls like this, the levels of annoyance are growing as well.

@lproven ouch, I am sorry. At least it serves the goal of making social networking better. And the results thus far we are a long way on the road towards a Personal social networking paradigm shifts that provides you more control in finding the crowd you're most comfortable with.

https://coding.social/blog/reimagine-social/#personal-social-networking

@smallcircles Hey, no biggie.

I am just not very fond of these metaphors though. It's all been going downhill since Usenet, in my book.

@smallcircles

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

@smallcircles

tl'dr I think you might be right. the below are some thoughts but isn't directly addressing what you were saying, it just sits in the same universe.

I've been thinking about this exchange, and what I am seeing on Fedi is there's a tendency on the part of the promoters (especially on Mastodon, but to some extent all of them) to conflate shared interests with server preferences. way back in the day, Usenet was popular, and your connection to it did help as part of your (with a university, or other provider) (username@the.org.im.in.edu) but the discussions were separated by topics (sci.space, talk.bizarre, etc) and at least from what I saw did not become an echo chamber. some topics were moderated.

Reddit is centralized but still tries to do that. however since there's moderation and such still an echo chamber and everyone has throwaway handles.

Fedi is more like usenet, but people instead tell newcomers to find community by picking the right server and using hashtags. that's offputting and also leaves people who don't have time to go digging kind of lost and at the mercy of the boosting preferences of whoever does have time. and the hashtags are a guess, and rely on accurate autocomplete (which in my experience doesn't exist), and are often not used by people posting.

if there was a better way to register and define topics other than using freeform hashtags that might help, and also would shut down a lot of "hoa" behaviour like "put politics behind a trigger warning" etc. it would make it easier to avoid undesired topics, by simply not following them. but I suspect that means a change to the AP protocol which is already a mess.

@smallcircles none of the above.

@lproven yes, I can understand that, and when e.g. we compare with LinkedIn, then it is all full of "add your like" polls that are not more than influencer growth-hacking. We should not get there.

Note that I posted this against a backdrop of warning for existential threats that the fediverse also faces at the same time. The top of this thread and onwards gives a good summary..

https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116109447243110037

The thread has many forks that delve in the interesting underlying social dynamics that we'd benefit from if we better understood them, and able to support them in our tools.

For example the discussion triggered by @johannab in this response..

https://cosocial.ca/@johannab/116166674248470065

@johannab

Oww, that is interesting. See here what brought me to the #ActivityPub fediverse ages ago on IT timescales..

https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116109998586728783

@johannab

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!

@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.

@smallcircles

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.