Where do you find good online discussion these days?
-
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕replied to Doc Edward Morbius ⭕ on last edited by
-
mariusreplied to Doc Edward Morbius ⭕ on last edited by
@dredmorbius thank you for the reply, I'll try to put your words into actionable items for me to work on, but some of your suggestions are paradigmatically opposite to what I am trying to achieve with BrutaLinks. I think the stronger two limitations of my design are: the service needs to be quite simple to install and operate, (so it fosters many small communities), and the interactions between users and service need to be possible using the vanilla ActivityPub vocabulary. So, some of your suggestions might require additional tooling on top of a simple main service (think something like automod), or be impossible to implement all together.
-
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕replied to marius on last edited by
@mariusor So ... yeah, I was thinking in terms of a centralised platform. Distributed is a whole 'nother ball of wax tadpoles....
I'd still stick with search, Markdown, and classification tools.
With distributed systems, discovery becomes an even bigger challenge. Note too that the idea that the average person, or even organisation (company, academic, NGO, governmental office) will install / run their own software is increasingly foreign. For better or worse, SaaS has eaten the world, and for most (people, orgs, etc.) spinning up a FB page, Subreddit, Instagram, Discord, etc., is the path of least resistance for both the org and its public.
(I'm not saying I agree with this or think it's a Good Thing. I AM saying that It Is A Thing.)
The idea behind Diaspora* was that people would run their own pods. Few have, though yes, it is distributed. I'll note that Diaspora* absolutely fails at discovery, even on platform, but most especially for the 99.999875% of all people who don't have a Diaspora* account.
I'd thought of asking you what you had in mind before writing my previous rant. If it's not too late, I'll ask now. The project page is vague in that regard.
-
mariusreplied to Doc Edward Morbius ⭕ on last edited by
@dredmorbius the idea behind brutalinks was less as a multi-purpose discussion platform, but a modern recreation of a technical discussion group or mailing list. Sadly I don't have an elevator pitch better than the README of the github repository, or the slightly expanded wiki page on sourcehut: https://man.sr.ht/~mariusor/go-activitypub/brutalinks/index.md
Until now nobody was interested enough to ask questions, so I don't have my thoughts ordered in a better way. If you go through this, I'd appreciate any questions or feedback.
-
@dredmorbius
I think one thing that doesn't appear in the wiki or readme, is the fact that ideally the individual brutalinks instances should operate without the need for users to create local accounts. This is still e nebulous technical issue in my mind, so I don't have a good solution at hand.Basically you would be able to "participate" in the discussions on a brutalinks instance with your existing ActivityPub account (be it mastodon or something else).
The instance would be the convenience gathering point for the discussion, but it would exist in your regular inbox too.
-
@dredmorbius
I'm not sure how feasible this dream is in the context of the attitude of mastodon's devs towards other ActivityPub implementations, or even making their own spec compatible, but maybe some day. -
Woozle Hypertwinreplied to Doc Edward Morbius ⭕ on last edited by
I have thoughts also, but no time left to formulate them this evening
-
@woozle feel free to drop a reply any time you organize them.
-
Some relatively-quick thoughts, to avoid the "get everything in there" mental wall -- more addressed to @mariusor than to @dredmorbius, I think (he's already aware of most/all of this).
Link-collection is something in which I have a keen interest. I kluged together a system for my MediaWiki-based political site (issuepedia.org), but it's ugly and slow and writing my own data-driven CMS is now on the project-pile. I'll be interested to see what you come up with, especially if its data can be integrated into other projects somehow.
I've been thinking a lot about what software can do towards maximizing reasonability in political discussions and minimizing bad-faith participation, and... well, basically this and this are what I've come up with so far. (Note that most of the writing there is from 2016 or so.)
Also, fwiw, I've been running/moderating this here fedi instance since 2017, so I've got some experience in finding what works (and Opinions about what doesn't).
Oh, and I should probably also mention these argumentation guidelines that I've come up with for Issuepedia over the years (mainly 2010-2022ish).
-
@woozle thank you. The thoughts about process more than technology are much appreciated.