Complete this sentence:

@smallcircles a federation of planets like in start trek

@wavesculptor

Thank you!

An insight of this thread, also indicated in your post, is that everyone creates their own social experience and can foster good habits to improve it. Fediverse allows us to do that. It enables us to be more social online and improve our 'cyberspace' cultures. A paradigm shift towards Personal social networking.

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

PS. It is really me, a person formally known as @humanetech at mastodon social. The 'automated' indicator was first of all a tease (a hedonic driver), but also the intent to use this account as an organization channel for Social coding commons, operated by a group of people. Which didn't happen thus far. Things move slow, and time moves fast. There's no automation, just plain masto web UI and me typing

That said, given the huge disruption we face today with AI et al, much more pondering of the risk and impact are in order, than the random firings of complaints into the ether I see so often. See:

https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116158937812802335

@smallcircles @unattributed

What would be an alternative to the word User?

In my dayjob we have Organizations aka "Customers" with groups of "Users" who use our service for their journalistic work.

@smallcircles your question is a cognitive dissonance for me.

Firstly, I've only ever experienced Google+ circles in an environment where the participants are similar to LinkedIn, posting about professional topics and/or corporate syncophacy. They are a good way to seal yourself into an echo chamber/bubble, even within that type of discourse

Secondly, influencer social media always feels more like people pitching their point of view or hot take or maybe just themselves. It's about collecting follower count for credibility. Fedi mostly isn't like that but there are some.

Lastly, I'm in the US, right now with political situation there is necessarily disruption and shouting and points to be made. (Some of them might even be correct!). But it does affect social media experience; it would probably make matters worse to increase the echo chamber effects.

@aliceice @unattributed

When speaking in a general sense, you can substitute with people, person, human. "The user" becomes "the person", and "user-centric" becomes human-centric or people-centric, whatever fits best in context.

More interesting when not just defaulting to saying "user", is asking the question: Whom are we serving with our software? Who is the audience, who are stakeholders and stakeholder groups that have Needs that must be addressed by our solution?

"Joyful creation", the SX formula that envisions cocreation at scale supported by the social web, discerns between Creators and Clients stakeholder groups. If we apply this formula to Software develpment, then creator might be a Dev, but also Tester, Technical writer, etc. People switch stakeholder hats: A dev being client of an upstream project.

In your case you may have Journalists in a News Media domain. And that "Customer" stakeholder name, may indicate a Sales domain. Or may be a stakeholder group, really.

@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..

https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116159361728695210

@smallcircles

Other: 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.

@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