Re: [autonomo.us] Introducting Strypey

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 3:39 AM, Danyl Strype
<address@hidden> wrote:
> My name is Danyl Strype. I'm an independent journalist, citizen scientist,
> free culture advocate, and permaculture designer based in Aotearoa/ NZ. I've
> been involved in starting up and supporting the local versions of Indymedia
> and CreativeCommons, and I'm currently a usability consultant for the
> ongoing redevelopment of permaculture.org.nz, which I'm hoping can be a
> flagship project/ crash test dumy for federated social web tools. More about
> me here:
> Disintermedia.net.nz/strype

Welcome, thanks for joining. There's tons of cool stuff on your sites,
all should check out.

> I've been attempting to map out the various packages and protocols in the
> federated social networking space for a while as part of my Disintermedia
> project:
> http://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/fyre-exyt/

I think there have been several sites/pages like this that list a
bunch of projects and protocols that want to be relevant to federated
social networking. It's a lot of work, but I'd love to see a resource
that moves beyond lists -- compare and contrast projects and protocols
at high and low level. It's really hard to tell what is real and what
is not, what to join, and if you want to build something that
interoperates...not likely.

> It's seemed to me for some time that cracking the federated social
> networking problem will take more than just good software. I think federated
> social networking will only succeed when the underlying technology become as
> automatic, reliable, and invisible to users as the machinations of the
> internet protocols are to users of the web.

That involves good software. :) I think there's a lot to be said for
huge network effects, even if the software is bad and painful.

> The current giants (Twitter,
> Farcebook etc) have succeeded where plenty of other proprietary walled
> gardens have failed, or just hobbled along with a loyal base of users (eg
> Ning). This article in PCMag makes some interesting comments on why that
> might be:
> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384588,00.asp
>
> Two other pop psychology insights which I think are relevant here. One is
> that things which explicitly invite people to participate tend to get more
> participants. I felt welcome to join this list because of Mike's invitation
> to do so in the '2013 reboot' blog post.

I'm glad. :) Not specific to federated social web, but FWIW making
people feel invited to participate in and contribute to free software
communities is kind of the core theory of https://openhatch.org

> The other is that people tend to
> follow 'behavioural traces', to quote environmental psychologist Nikki
> Harre. Harre cites research that people in a place covered in litter are
> much more likely to litter themselves than if you put them in a place with
> no litter. These two things mean that interfaces are really important to
> whether a free social service succeeds of fails. Interfaces which actively
> invite people to join, helps them connect with other users they already have
> some relationship with (even if they are on other services), and shows off
> what other people are using the service for, are much more likely to attract
> and retain users.

I agree this is all really important. Maybe only tangentially related
to this, and gaining network effects mentioned above,
http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2011/12/25/fsw-invite/

> So, that's me, and some of my thoughts on the issues that Autonomo.us works
> on. Look forward to some insightful conversations over the coming months.

Excellent.

Mike