Trying to read some of your posts. There is a lot I don’t understand. Some words resonate. Putting this here for future use:
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Well, browsing your blog, it is difficult for me to get back to what I read. I can’t conceptualize it as a space with that being there and that being there. But I succeeded here http://hamishcampbell.com/tag/boatingeurope/:
… from these small openings, people can try to step outside this mess and challenge the status quo… we are looking for the tiny minority who can still think outside this mess and are willing to challenge the… narrative… a call to action for those who want to create a more equitable and just society.
This resonates 
- Stepping outside, thinking outside.
- Call to action.
- Equitable and just society.
On 1: My tool(?) for stepping / thinking outside is a conversation of certain quality. (There are many conversation which keep me inside.)
Some of the qualities: one fixed partner or small group, persistent, frequent enough, regular(?), equal(?) / equitable(?), just…
Such a conversation, for me, creates a space, where the participant can play. They can play princesses and dragons. Or trains. Or the creators of the universe.
2 posts were split to a new topic: Social Web and App Free Computing
This is observably true.
I agree with David Graeber that most social life is still organised this way. Bureaucratic machines like states and corporations try to convince us they organise it all ( this is also discussed by Timothy Snyder in the context of the stories that create ‘nations’. But when people want to have a meal together, or go camping, or help a friend move house, we don’t rely on a bureaucratic machine to organise it for us.
Further evidence, we are doing it right now! Up until a year ago, with the exception of W3C standardising ActivityPub, the entire fediverse was organised by spontaneous voluntary association. Even now that there are some bureaucratic machines involved, their role is peripheral.
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Using HTTPS is no more centralised than using DNS. If you don’t use HTTPS, you’re exposing your site to a risk of MitM attacks, and your webserver being used in giant botnets like the Great Canon;
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Agen we have a danger of a #ragecircle as one person is talking about the social impact and the other is talking about the technical impact. The point I was making is that most sites on the openweb rely on a singal point of failer https://letsencrypt.org/ " A nonprofit Certificate Authority providing TLS certificates to 300 million websites." this was a stupid (good) technical solution for a federated openweb to take, you can find out more about issues like this #geekproblem on Mastodon
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Preliminary note 1: Strictly speaking, these possibilities are not mutually exclusive. A thing can be both greatly reduced and most of.
Preliminary note 2: Two different words. I was thinking about big cooperation as something good, eg language. You are thinking about big corporation as something bad, eg Microsoft; I guess.
Fair point. Do you have a solution to propose?
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Well, “social life” is complex, its description is complex and its mesurement is complex too. I propose to concentrate on what we do, on what we want to do and on what we shall / should / will do
My attention is directed to a kind of small cooperation in pairs or small groups. Some of the qualities of the cooperation I look for are:
- long-term
- frequent
- regular
- equal
- autopoietic, autonomous, self-thematising, self-regulating, self-determining, conscious…
- it is its own purpose…
- …
Here, I am a guest in an enviroment of people, who are capable of, and engaged in highly sofisticated small autopoietic cooperations. (I have a suspision, it is difficult for you(?) to imagine / to work with how ordinary folks operate.)
I was thinking about that a while back. But apparently there are other CAs supporting ACME protocol. And horribly imperfect though the CA system is at least it prevents the kinds of injection attacks which were common over a decade ago.
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Well, I would be interested in some data about how often people have a meal together, or go camping together or help a friend move house… It may be country or region specific. I like the site and here is what I have fished out on the first cast: https://ourworldindata.org/social-connections-and-loneliness. And at first skip it looks to me thant no, not everything is bright and rosy and the trends are of less meal together, less camping together and less helping moving a house.
But, again(?), however the data are interesting, for me, the more important is, what you, @strypey, and me, and others are doing. I am trying to intitiate small conversations / cooperation, which, if possible, thematise what we, the small people, can do to make the Universe a better place. And, although I have a very limited success, I perceive it as a very difficult task and I do not see around me happy bubbling plethora of small conversation / cooperation about how we deal with the climatic catastrofy, with the Russian genocidal war against Ukraine, Trump, Orbán and other ‘small nuisances’.
(Sorry for the irony 
I am angry 
I see my ridiculousness too )
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Some more data: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/12/pgad385/7457939. Got link here: https://toot.yosh.is/@yosh/111530120812470905.
The paper is a deep and narrow investigation of how toxic comments decrease engagement. It is difficult to measure that in broader context, but my feeling is that, say in decades, willingness to engage is decreasing; or, at least, shifting from ‘public’ and cummulative spaces (for example fora?) to ‘private’ and transient spaces (for example Mastodon?).
An unrelated note: Wouldn’t it be possible that my computer is mine and there are “things” that come in rather than my computer pulls me over to different places / enviroments / spaces / platforms…?
…our emotional and psychological connection to each other and to any community, including political community, is changed by the behaviour that digital media activates and encourages…
Populocracy: The Tyranny of Authenticity and the Rise of Populism by Catherine Fieschi
And here we go again: https://thingy.social/@malcircuit/111683362969970925 . 432 boosts. 666 likes. And some discussion.
Let us discuss the desirability of forums in a forum. Here or elsewhere.
You’ll be delighted to see the progress that this forum software Discourse is making to become part of the Fediverse, through the great work of @angus. See: Adding federation support to Discourse.
And other than that Julian Lam of NodeBB.org is also working on forum federation. Hopefully having multiple forum softwares will get a good set of Fediverse Enhancement Proposals to help general interoperability of this domain.
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Yes. Great. I appreciate what you and this people are doing. That is right, good and beautiful
But.
I don’t believe that this societal disease can be cured purely by technical solutions. And the same for other social issues. I am trying to address directly the human ability to guide themselves directly (both: address directly and guide themselves directly) and not to be guided by technology or other external forces.
I agree. But when having technical solutions in place, people can help with the advocacy to convince others to actually use them and form all kinds of communities and social gatherings. Discover interesting uses, and tell about desirable qualities to be added. Over time all that will help create network effects and lure more people to interact, as well as incentivise more developers to offer better social networking support for them, etc.
It’s amazing how much reading this one short paragraph has motivated me to respond to your various posts (all these months later) in a more thoughtful way. As the old saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar ; )
Is it rude to ask if you are using English as a second language? I ask only because this can be useful to share. As it sometimes leads to a style of writing that seems vague and rambling to a native speaker, and this can easily be mistaken for being intentionally obtuse, or even trolling.
Sharing this fact admits a minor vulnerability, offering and inviting a level of trust. This can then set the scene for a more compassionate conversation.
Anyway, I think I’m starting to understand where you are coming from. It’s true that there is no technological solution for people’s need to see faces, make physical contact with other humans, and so on. Online socialising, like going to a conference, is a supplement to everyday, intimate social life, never a substitute for it. Douglas Rushkoff’s writing and podcasting about Team Human captures this nicely, as summed up by the factoid that the word “conspire” originally mean ‘to breathe together’.
At one time I was involved in developing the website for Permaculture in NZ. One of my main design goals for the website was to introduce people to others in their local area, and let them know about in-person events they might want to attend. Again, it was very important to me that the website supplement and increase the amount of in-person social activity in the permaculture network, rather than pulling people into spending more time on their devices using the website.