Complete this sentence:
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@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.
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@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
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@draNgNon thanks, some very good food for thought.
I think the crucial point is that we do not know and do not offer proper ways to deal with different modes of communication, esp. if the only medium channel constitutes a stream of sticky notes, such as we have here in this #microblogging space.
On the first point, when is something an #EchoChamber vs. a healthy interest area, I think depends how well one is able to cross the 'membranes' of all the various social contexts and information spaces one navigates online, as it were.
There should be a place for 'influencing' to an extent if only to reach your crowd and build community and such. But all in balance and proportion and clear social context preferably. Non-profits and #activist groups want to influence, we may want to be informed.
To the last point. There's urgency to address the dark world situation, and either organize or lose. #SX defines #CALMculture as a way to engage in constructive #activism..
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.
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Complete this sentence:
"I experience #fediverse as a .."
@smallcircles none of the above.
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@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.
@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..
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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..
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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.
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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.
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@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!
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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
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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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.
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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.
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@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 
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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 @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.
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@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 @lproven LOL I have the ability to keep scrolling.
The foetid actual BS of places like LInkedIn have me scurrying back here where people are bein' themselves. -
Complete this sentence:
"I experience #fediverse as a .."
@smallcircles@social.coop Ghost cozy village.
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@smallcircles@social.coop Ghost cozy village.
@coffeetomorrow that is an original combination. I like it.
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