✨Nora Tindall: "actually, i'd love to hear about this. folks who …" -...

actually, i'd love to hear about this. folks who used "web 1.0" forums, based on stuff like phpBB, extensively, and now use Mastodon, Twitter, and the like:

what does microblogging give you that forums didn't?

my personal answer is that (mastodon especially) lets me more easily define a circle of friends who can see certain posts, and update them about my life - but even that's a hack on top of multiple accounts!

i think I really just want g+. :(

part of what I'm hearing is that people want to be able to consume forum-like communities in a centralized place with consistent markup for posting.

sounds like a well-defined C2S "forum protocol" would help a lot...

@tindall Reach, casual accessibility via smartphone, and (in particular) limits to the length of posts. Oh, and better filtering overall

@tindall A forum is one community, usually - even Usenet was more like a platform for distinct communities. Twitter was (and is) much larger and with fewer community boundaries, which made it easier to explore and make connections - until the constant pressure for “engagement” started to encourage harassment and context collapse, anyway

@tindall …or to put it another way, forums feel like small bounded communities. Twitter at its best felt like a single large geographical area you could move around and form communities within?

@ghost_bird @tindall

I just posted elsewhere that "Community" should be a native concept of the fediverse, imho.

I call it a "Community has no Boundary" paradigm, where you have Groups and (meaningful) Relationships to its participants and other Groups.

Mostly when people talk about Group support in apps it is still this very limited thing, and on fedi the server instance technical boundary is loosely used to mark a community. Guess your timeline implicitly is another one.

@[email protected] shorter threads - that usually stay on the topic rather than drifting over time - are easier for my brain to parse

@tindall honestly... mobile versions. forums just stopped being developed and then that was that

@clarfonthey yeah, this is something i definitely agree with. for all it's faults, discourse has done a pretty good job with this, and i feel confident it would be pretty easy to do for most kinds of forum software!

@tindall honestly discourse really isn't a valid substitute for forum software since it really didn't match any of the original vibes it had going for it. it's a flat set of threads; it's a replacement for ticketing systems, really, not a forum

@clarfonthey Lines, the primary Discourse site I use, is not a flat set of threads; it's heavily categorized, plus it has tags within those categories. Perhaps they've modified the software, but this isn't my experience of it.

@tindall last I checked, the categories were treated more like tags and filters than categories, but I might be wrong

@keithzg Heh, which two are you referring to? I think siloing/ghost towns are reflections of the same problem (and maybe can be solved with federation?)

@keithzg yeah, i completely agree. Lines, a Discourse forum focused on electronic music and Monome gear, is one of my favorite online spaces, precisely because of that focus.

@keithzg @tindall yeah for me it's definitely the ability to see everything all in one place instead of bouncing around two five completely disconnected sites all with their own different UI behavior and markup conventions.

@tindall I just want what g+ could have been if it weren't Google

@tindall and... Ok the awful thing is I think I have an idea what it would take to build it?

@tindall it would have to be client-side. I hate that but, everyone is so spread out... So it has to be honest about what scopes are possible. But really show us; really let us manage the many ways of contact and the many flow streams of .. the views we get, into our friends lives.

Like bridging everything to a lowest denominator such as what gajim was before it was pidgin back when it was gaim, that was a valiant effort. And it brought a moment of usability. I could at least then have one friend across five messengers in one place and choose my target, etc.

But bring it modern. Update the UI so hard. Circles was a very important idea. The way we all used Livejournal and Dreamwidth... Think further though, it's the friends and comms later of your second brain and its so very personal, it's not some service you connect to Out There, those are only the message couriers.

@feonixrift @tindall Want that pretty much Diaspora? I remember that circles concept/UI was duplicated wholesale from Diaspora.

Admittedly Dispora seems to have petered out (but not sure, they deleted my Kickstarter account and I stopped checking it).

@feonixrift @tindall If it's the "circles" model, didn't they just "borrow" that from Diaspora?

If only we could get Diaspora on ActivityPub, now..

@seachaint @tindall weren't they working on that at one point? I didn't get hooked on diasp... Mainly because circles are no use without anyone to talk to.

@tindall yeah... pretty sure *everyone* wants federated g+/circles, so why isn't this being worked on :>

@f0x I don't.

Circles turn out to be much less useful on close examination and much use than they first appear.

(Long-time G+ user, still active on Diaspora*.)

@tindall

@tindall I used to be on forums quite a lot in the early 00s, but it was always for purely practical purposes. At some point (2006-7 iirc) I was on irc a lot, on a very nice project with great people, and that felt like a community, but it didn't last.
Fedi is the first place since then where I fell I have something like a community.

@tindall I don't see why not ActiivityPub could be that protocol with agreed upon conventions on how to implement forums with it?

I'd really like to see the fediverse become (even less) microblogging-focused basically

@piggo i suggest you read the thread you're replying to for the reasons people aren't just doing that.

@msh @tindall

The thing is that every type of application has its own use cases where it shines. Microblog vs. Forum idem.

I just posted how an interesting discussion forks out in many parallel branches (in my case 30+) and becomes unmanageable (btw, here's the thread hierarchy: https://mathstodon.xyz/@ColinTheMathmo/107292124580473329 )

And forums serve better as archives too, whereas on fedi microblogging.. everything sinks into history really quick and becomes very hard to find afterwards.

Attached: 1 image @[email protected] Meanwhile, to assist with your navigation, here's a "thumbnail" of that chart:

@tindall Yeah, pretty much. The the ability to easily segregate different lives without a "switch user" mechanic. Also ideally, the ability to limit personas so my work site doesn't even have a hint of my alts.

I have many lives, very few people are in all of them.

@tindall Deduplication would also be nice, just in case a music loving programmer decides to post a cross persona post, I don't see 2-3 identical copies.

@xavavu interestingly, when I was attempting to describe federation to my partner and how certain instances can choose to not federate with other instances, she was like "Oh right, like G+ circles?" Obviously it was me not explaining well enough, but still interesting that it was the first example that came to mind. Circles as a feature had good intuition it seems.

Going to have to check out Zap now!

@xavavu YMMV, but I just don't want my single username associated with all the circles I might participate in.

@xavavu
I just had a look and it seems Zap is a fork of Hubzilla with a few changes? Sadly they don't mention this anywhere.

Yes, Zap was forked from Hubzilla by the same creator
More than "a few changes" have occured since 2018

@xavavu I was on G+ from the early public invite-only Beta through its shutdown. The platform had its strengths, but I think most people fail to recognise them:

Google infrastructure. G+ was very, very, very seldom down, and almost always highly performant. It didn't always have search, but when it did, it was excellent.
Some really good sanitation and hygiene systems. Very few of the problems now endemic to social media (Twitter & FB especially) were rampant on G+. There were some signs, but I poked around enough to recognise that there was actually some very effective moderation occurring. (The 8+ million Communities had virtually no nazism/fascism etc., despite confounding factors such as "aryan" being a perfectly legitimate term in India.)
A good, if not ultimately overwhelmingly compelling, initial user cohort.
Google's moneybags, at least for a while.
Very little commercialism. On the world's largest advertiser, it was an advertising-free zone.
Pretty good photos feature.
Really Fucking Long Posts. You could write a book or three in them. Average length was still about a tweet (120 chars or so).
At various times, a good chat / video-chat feature which for its time excelled relative to others.
A mix of features attempted over the years, some actually pretty good, others not so much. But a decent test bed all told.

Mind, I had a hell of a lot of complaints as well. But there were some good points.

Circles weren't one ;-)

@tindall ...it's kind of weird - our strongest association when it comes to defining circles of friends who can see certain posts is Livejournal (or, well, Dreamwidth - Livejournal got bought out by Russian oligarchs).

We never used G+ much, though.

-

@tindall or Diaspora. Diaspora has "aspects" (and has had them before G+ had "circles").

@tindall Microblogging gives me a space to drop thoughts without much care for form or structure. It's convenient and mostly entertaining for consumption, but I don't really like it. It's fire-and-forget outbound, and inbound is a disconnected random stream.

Most forums I used were small communities built around a topic, moderately active. It was hard to stay when you lost connection to the main topic.

Funny you mention G+ - for all its failures, it was a good place between forums and blogs.

@galaxis @tindall

I frequently encounter that all interesting discussion on #mastodon really needs a forum. Below is the hierarchy of a recent discussion I had, and it has more than 30 parallel branches. Manage that. Plus in a week time it is all forgotten history.

@galaxis @tindall

And if your masto post references a forum discussion, asking to contribute there, then still no one does that so you have to copy/paste yourself to keep things in sync (having to create a forum account is a big barrier, of course)

@humanetech User accounts are a huge barrier period.

The time when you could just post to a forum (or Usenet) via an anonymous form or self-asserted identity ... had its appeals. I'd love to see some kind of client-side PKI-based identity assertion rather than all the current crap of needing accounts or having some centralised identity service (which was what G+ was originally intended to be, BTW, since everyone's waxing rhapsodic over it here...).

Use robust tech, hide that from the users who need to have that hidden from them. But enough with centralised identity.

(And yes, it should support pseudonymity.)

@galaxis @tindall

@humanetech And of course, spammers, griefers, propagandists, and worse, mostly ruined this.

If there were some way to bring back some semblance of this though it'd be nice.

@galaxis @tindall

@freemo @humanetech @galaxis @tindall I recall a Usenet client having such an overview at the top of your post, a bit like the branches in a git repository - although it's been decades, so I might slightly misremember.

Actually, a git-like view might work quite well to give you an idea of where you are in the convo. It'd be a client-side thing, though.