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The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

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Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#71

Post by bombcar »

asim wrote: post #47
ajani wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In ye olden days the whole world didn’t exist. Maps indicated ‘here be dragons’. I feel you though, marginalia, and appreciate your work. I wrote a search engine too once and after a few months of me not using it myself, gave up. My results were too specific and not broad enough to include the world.

> In ye olden days the whole world didn’t exist This! Why is it everything we build is to communicate with the world? The reality is we live in a certain physical space, we can only see, hear and speak at a certain distance and while technology has enabled a way to overcome that, it does feel like we're overwhelmed by the scale of humans we can communicate with. I want to go back to real, small, private connection. H…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

> Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution.

Even if the whole world isn't built this way, much of it could be, especially groups and interactions.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#72

Post by bombcar »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #68
bombcar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's assimilation speed and has been seen time and time again in various contexts. If I take my American family and move to Australia, we will become Australian over time. If I take my family and the entire city I live in to Australia, there will be an American city in Australia. Eternal September is just when the influx overwhelmed the "carrying capacity" of Usenet, and anyone who has been on any forum for a length…

Assimilation speed versus rate of joining versus rate of people leaving all need to be kept in balance to have a long running, tight-knit community. An interesting example is university clubs: they have the intrinsic property that people's tenure in the club is very finite, typically a maximum of 4 years. Despite this constant turnover of membership, clubs tend to maintain a relatively constant culture. I posit that…

Those are good points; a university club almost by definition has 25% turn over each year, but it's scheduled, defined, and worked around. People don't usually just disappear; they hand off responsibilities and train, either explicitly or implicitly.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#73

Post by dasil003 »

asim wrote: post #39
marginalia_nu wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what ruins communities is large sustained growth and not size. Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days. What kills most mainstream social media is needing to show growth to investors. This turns them from a village with familiar faces into a tra…

That's good insight and similar to my own experiences. I spent time on various forums in the late 90s and early 00s. It was a golden experience and I got to know a lot of the members there. You had the usual suspects chatting amongst all the lurkers. The model was far superior to the type chat systems were using today to build similar communities. I did the VC funded thing and personally don't want to go back to it.…

> I also think it comes down to the values of the creators of any platform. At what point are they going to sell out and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is in the service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I think the only way to mitigate that is structure the project and team in a way to support it.

This is the crux of why we can't have nice things, and I've been thinking a lot about it. There are so many dynamics that trend towards corporate consolidation and ultimately the alienating effects of modern technology. The money to be made combined with rapid global scalability and network lock-in effects, mean that it's an uphill fight the whole way.

The bright spot is that so many technologists are disgusted with the direction tech has taken, and we have the know-how and agency to build alternatives. In order to address the selling out problem, I think we need to establish some standardized and well understood commitments to shepherding projects, products and companies that have some real teeth while not requiring a vow of poverty to maintain.

The other key piece is finding the right hooks to get normals using these products and not just defaulting to the big tech alternatives due to friction. This is the hardest part by far, but I feel there is enough general frustration with big tech that will be possible to harness in some way. The key will be some kind of killer app that appeals to enough people to gain critical mass.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#74

Post by telotortium »

em-bee wrote: post #52
asim wrote: post #5

I like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro" communities. https://micro.mu . We limit groups to 20 people. I think that's an ideal number for real connections. Need more, it's likely for a different type of communication.

20 seems a bit low. what happens if i want to invite 21 people? many groups have a few active people and many less active people. one group i am in has about 80 members, 10-20 or which are active and keep a steady stream of communication. if the group were to grow much beyond that, it would be to much. so you are right that 20 active people is a good group size but if there is a technical limit of 20 that means i hav…

For Wechat specifically, I think that the group size limit of 500 may be related to Chinese law. They want group sizes to remain somewhat small to prevent news from spreading too quickly.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#75

Post by asim »

Solvency wrote: post #66
asim wrote: post #5

I like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro" communities. https://micro.mu . We limit groups to 20 people. I think that's an ideal number for real connections. Need more, it's likely for a different type of communication.

The big bubbly space-inefficient chatroom UI you're using seems so irrelevant/obsolete here. It already makes me stressed out, thinking of dealing with an SMS group on my iPhone of 20 people. It'd be the worst possible user experience to engage with a meaningful community in a meaningful way over time.

Thanks, we're thinking about changing to a feed format but will take your comments into consideration.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#76

Post by vincnetas »

dasil003 wrote: post #73
asim wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good insight and similar to my own experiences. I spent time on various forums in the late 90s and early 00s. It was a golden experience and I got to know a lot of the members there. You had the usual suspects chatting amongst all the lurkers. The model was far superior to the type chat systems were using today to build similar communities. I did the VC funded thing and personally don't want to go back to it.…

> I also think it comes down to the values of the creators of any platform. At what point are they going to sell out and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is in the service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I think the only way to mitigate that is structure the project and team in a way to support it. This is the crux of why we can't have nice things, and I've been thinking a lot about it. Ther…

And one more thing to think of, how to make this new good product resistant to EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish). Because you want to make it open, this means it's open to multi billion corporations who can throw lots of $$$ and build a nicer client really fast. And from there, well we know how it goes.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#77

Post by theptip »

em-bee wrote: post #52
asim wrote: post #5

I like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro" communities. https://micro.mu . We limit groups to 20 people. I think that's an ideal number for real connections. Need more, it's likely for a different type of communication.

20 seems a bit low. what happens if i want to invite 21 people? many groups have a few active people and many less active people. one group i am in has about 80 members, 10-20 or which are active and keep a steady stream of communication. if the group were to grow much beyond that, it would be to much. so you are right that 20 active people is a good group size but if there is a technical limit of 20 that means i hav…

Demmings number seems to be a good coordination point, ie the group size where you can know everyone’s name. Around 100-125.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#78

Post by tech_ken »

nehal3m wrote: post #55
tech_ken wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweet! Yeah my partner and I have made a shift to keep our lives in our personal calendars which has been a huge QoL upgrade for us, but it's still so hard to keep track of who in the friend group is available when, as well as keep everyone remembering what's coming up in the next week or so. I feel like this was the biggest value+add of Facebook, but that particular product is now all but unusable :(. Adding shared,…

I think NextCloud pretty much fits the bill here. I think it's a fantastic free tool that's easy to host on your own for exactly this kind of thing.

AFAIK NextCloud aims to replace something like Google Calendar, but this isn't exactly what I'm after. What I really need is something that replaces FB Events. I want to be able to create a distinct event, with like a page, time, and location where invitees can coordinate stuff, post pictures, etc. I'd then like for these events to be aggregated into a single place, which is the shared group calendar. Self-hosting a replacement for the GSuite would kind of solve this need, people could use Signal for chat and post pictures to NextCloud, but overall seems misaligned with the featureset I'm seeking.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#79

Post by mawise »

bamfly wrote: post #18

Main thing I want to self-host for friends, that's not served by any of a hundred chat apps: A place to share media reviews and recommendations. Wiki-like is OK, as long as table support is great. Difficulty: it should be able to helpfully look up and create entries for any new media it encounters, using various online sources (IMDB, The Movie Database, TVDB, maybe the Musicbrainz DB, something else authoritative-ish…

I've thought about this in the work I've done on Haven[1]. Today Haven is just self-hosted linear posting like a blog, but private and tied together with RSS. I've got ambitions of adding media/restaurant/service recommendations where you can post your recommendations and they can be separately searched/aggregated, probably even keeping RSS as the protocol. This gives you a Yelp that can't be gamed by companies because there is no central place for a company to go to game /manage the recommendations.

[1]: https://havenweb.org

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#80

Post by asim »

vitehozonage wrote: post #70
asim wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe slack messages are private? Or DMs on twitter? How about the content you store on Notion or Google docs. I guess what I'm saying is there's a lot of places where it doesn't matter as long as your data is stored securely and privately in a way that no one can access it and the operators are not mistreating it. At the end of the day we still need a way to ensure certain terrible content never exists on t…

>Do you believe slack messages are private? Or DMs on twitter? How about the content you store on Notion or Google docs. No, so I would never choose to use them for communications with my intimate small groups, and nobody should. >securely and privately You cannot do that without E2EE. There are hacks constantly, if you have any security awareness. >At the end of the day we still need a way to ensure certain terrible…

> You seem to be intent on wanting people to just trust that you'll never sell the business and all the communication history, for confusing reasons

I think the words "just trust" here are not right. No I don't want people to "just" trust me because I wouldn't "just" trust someone else. I think the E2E thing is important but we already have platforms that facilitate this really well. If it's technically feasible to do in a way that doesn't slow product development, sure we'd do it, but if it's going to take me months on end and it will largely hinder a lot of what we're trying to build feature wise, then it's not really worth it. I think where pure privacy on that level is important to people they really should pick signal or similar. For me, I think what's more important is, can I trust the people running this platform to host that infrastructure well, to continue to put the community first and to drive maybe an alternative path that a lot of people are about e.g self host the data part. Self hosting comes up a lot but in the context of "I want to host the whole thing", what if it was just, where the data lives. At the same time, we're really thinking consumer first and no consumer wants to host anything, they're quite happy using existing services and E2E is not the first thing they think about, it's the frictionless communication or the features of the service. In the case where the consumer really cares about E2E its because they're doing something they don't want anyone to know about. Saying all this, look if I'm putting my personal details into it, or family photos, etc. I want to know no one is going to see or touch that, but maybe it's as basic as we use AES-256 on the client side and a randomly generated secret, or we just delete the data after 30 days and that's the policy.

I think there are services that really focused heavily on E2E but their goal was purely communication whereas we're sort of pushing towards doing more around community coordination.

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