Community

I really miss the age of social networks. In the age of social networks our sphere of influence was limited to our friends, and our friends of friends. The result is that social media was a friendly conversation rather than a popularity contest.

Over the last two days I have been looking at Threads and BlueSky and to a lesser extent Facebook and I am struck by how many thousands of posts and likes threads and posts get. In such an ecosystem we are in a popularity contest where some people get more attention than they can handle and deserve, whilst most normal people are ignored and solitary.

For some people the mass X-odus from Twitter to Bluesky is fantastic because it means that the community is growing and that by growing it means that more likeminded people will arrive. The flipside of this is that with a million new users per week, and growing, that’s a huge influx. That influx is bad news because for every decent person there are changes that the amount of trolling will increase.

For less than a week I have been using Threads heavily. In that time I have commented on plenty of posts without senseing any hostility or unpleasantness so I thought that Threads may be troll free. I realise that this is not the case after posting that I would not get the new iPhone SE coming out in 2025 if it had a price hike. In my eyes this is a reasonable statement. It is not rude or provocative. It is not critical of individuals or Apple. It’s just an opinion.

For several days I have replaced Facebook with Threads and the experience has been good. I have found that the community, so far, is ordinary, rather than geeky, and friendly rather than trolling or flamey.

I have been posting and commenting for a few days now and although four or five comments got me to block individuals the rest of interactions have been good. I feel I should elaborate about blocking. I block if someone is negative, without giving a valid response, if someone is negative and I am likely to be negative back, or if I feel that a defensive response could begin a flame or troll war.

There is a case for reverting to web forums. Web forums are small communities of like minded people that form around topics, ideas, or ideals. They want to have conversations where you look at topics and sub topics, rather than following people. By having conversations on a smaller scale there is more waiting around for answers, but the connections should be more worthwhile.

Recently the ActivityPub plugin for Wordpress jumped to version 1.0.0 from version 0.0.something. In so doing I expected to find that two way conversations would be possible from wordpress to the Fediverse, and back from the Fediverse to WordPress and ClassicPRess.

On at least three occasions toots that were written as a cry for empathy, or at least venting, were interacted with by apathetic people. For this simple reason I deleted two Fediverse accounts. I deleted my Mastodon.social account, and my FireFish.social accounts. I have a precise desire, when using social media. That desire is to find a community of likeminded individuals that I have such enjoyable conversations with, that I want to meet them in person.

The web was decentralised for a long time. The internet and social networks were designed around different niches. We had niches for people that did sports in the same area of Switzerland, that wanted to discuss a variety of topics, for music lovers and more. The change brought on by MySpace, Twitter, ICQ, Facebook and other projects is that it centralised all those communities so that everyone was in different communities, on three or four social networks.

richard - Nov 1, 2021

With the right people designing the interface it should be simpler to do things sustainably today. I think that a QR code that we can print out and add to a book with the same sticky things as for photo albums might be the best solution. A QR code takes seconds to scan and add a comment to. I should suggest that to them. I should study how to implement it.

Today I went for a slight variant and came across a book dating back to 1930 so of course I picked it up. I like the look and feel of old books. I also like that they carry history. The book is 91, almost 92 years old and it has been passed on from generation to generation for almost six generations. I looked in the book and at first I just ignored the scribbles at the front of the book, not thinking much of it. Now that I looked closer I noticed the BCID so I looked up bookcrossing.com and logged that I found the book.

Claire - Apr 1, 2007

What’s the subject of your dissertation and where do you go to school? Tried to find both bits of information on your blog, and I’m sure its there, just wanted to ask to save some time. Thanks, I enjoyed perusing your blog. Good luck with writing.