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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

#81

Post by nehal3m »

tech_ken wrote: post #78
nehal3m wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah I see, in that case NC probably is a bit of a misfit. There is a plugin named Announcement Center that will do something like that, but I guess it would be a hack:

https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/announcementcenter

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

#82

Post by marttt »

theptip wrote: post #77
em-bee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Excellent reference; I think it was Dunbar's number, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

"Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships."

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

#83

Post by theptip »

marttt wrote: post #82
theptip wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Excellent reference; I think it was Dunbar's number, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number "Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist R…

Quite right!

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

#84

Post by tetha »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #35
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.

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…

> 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.

Man, with me on the edge to nuking or not nuking my reddit account with a couple of smaller communities, I didn't need more nostalgia back here. I was part of the "night crew" over on the old freenode in a few tech channels since I'm from europe and the times I have time ended up being when the US was asleep, haha. Learned to much about a couple of topics over that time as well. I still know way too many arcane weirdnesses and internals of python from stints on #python.

Or old TF2/Tremulous/CS1.6/Quake servers. Times when we could call truces over voice to get us another beer and the other guy wouldn't come 'round the corner. And then you'd discuss current brand choices for a second. Or when one of the local pros started to take you seriously and would start some impromptu coaching, which usually involved a lot of death on your side because now they were looking for you.

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

#85

Post by q7xvh97o2pDhNrh »

tetha wrote: post #84
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…

> 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. Man, with me on the edge to nuking or not nuking my reddit account with a couple of smaller communities, I didn't need more nostalgia back here. I was part of the "night crew" over on the old freenode in a few…

Man, I learned so much about good architecture from just hanging out on Freenode in a few programming channels.

At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right?

Those were simpler times, I suppose. We were working with all the new frameworks of the day, and it was the grizzled old engineers alongside the young hotshots — and none of it mattered, because all anyone saw was your nick and your code. You'd put some interesting snippet up on one of those anonymous paste sites, and the critique would roll in.

I don't know how kids these days learn about dependency injection, the downsides of singleton architectures, the art of API design, or the nuanced tradeoffs of using an ORM to abstract over a relational model. But I rather enjoyed learning it all "on the streets" of IRC — frankly a far more welcoming and engineering-focused atmosphere than many tech companies.

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

#86

Post by ajani »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #48
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.

Well yeah, sure. The world still doesn't really exist. At least not in any where we can comprehend it. Since it is almost certainly incomprehensible and probably not even possible to capture the world as it is, then isn't the second best to build something that is nice?

Aw come on now, don’t play coy, you know what I meant :)

That just as we went from hunting and gathering to farms and now cities, internet grew from a few people having access in universities and some tech corporations, to now phones in the hands of children in villages.

Let’s be more inclusive and dare I say progressive even?

I, for one, am not hankering to gather and hunt.

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

#87

Post by ajani »

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…

You know what’s really truly private?

It’s what you said. The real world. Meet a friend. It’s as private as it gets.

Pick a small friend for true micro experience. :D

Jokes aside, unplug. And it doesn’t have to be that we build things at a world scale. But isn’t it amazing that we can and do build stuff at this scale.

Devs often don’t use tech as much as regular users! They build, and forget the use.

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

#88

Post by bovermyer »

tetha wrote: post #84
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…

> 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. Man, with me on the edge to nuking or not nuking my reddit account with a couple of smaller communities, I didn't need more nostalgia back here. I was part of the "night crew" over on the old freenode in a few…

There were definitely some TF2 servers that felt like familiar bars or chat rooms that happened to have gun mechanics on the side.

That doesn't happen in modern shooters. Heck, even MMORPGs rarely have that community feel anymore.

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

#89

Post by abnercoimbre »

epiccoleman wrote: post #51
bamfly wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've considered slapping something together in Django or what have you—libraries exist to make a lot of this not that hard—but... kids. And the new Zelda, for that matter :-)

The new Zelda has utterly destroyed my progress on side projects and also playing guitar. That's ok though, this happens to me every now and then - a game will come out that is so good / compelling that I just need to drop everything else and jam all my free time into it. It's almost like something in my psychology is saying "play the shit out of this so that we can get over the obsession and get back to other pursui…

One could argue it's important to play it if virtually all of your friends are playing it too (as is my case.) "Cultural moments" and what have you: it won't reach OOT levels, but boy is it close!

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

#90

Post by tetha »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #85
tetha wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Man, with me on the edge to nuking or not nuking my reddit account with a couple of smaller communities, I didn't need more nostalgia back here. I was part of the "night crew" over on the old freenode in a few…

Man, I learned so much about good architecture from just hanging out on Freenode in a few programming channels. At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right? Those were simpler times, I suppose. We were working with all the new frameworks of the day, and it was the grizzled old e…

> At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right?

There was some .. lets just call it, rather encouraged rebranding to libra.chat. And there is something else namesquatting the freenode name.

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