dredmorbius@joindiaspora.com
Doc Morbius (moved to Glasswings)

Morning Ramble: Personal media strategies and protocols

John Wehrle suggests at The Beginning is Near that it might be possible to split Google+ activity into separate activities using multiple tools. This is very much what I've been thinking, with the key requirement that the tools interoperate, and if possible interact.

What I foresee myself doing:

  1. Write, blog, research, organise, and Wiki: GitLab, using a static-site generator, and finding some way to support search (a critical function) and if possible at least some commenting capacity. In this case, my source content is directly in my control, under git, on my own desktop, in backups, and at any other hosts I syndicate that to.

  2. Direct syndication through RSS/Atom. Feedreaders and other systems can access / consume this. It's not widely used these days, but is the basis for basic syndication and other capabilities.

  3. Propagation through microblogging platform(s). Mastodon certainly. I may even set up a Twitter account. I'm considering the username "Registered under protest" preliminarily.... (There's already a "dredmorbius", it's not me.)

  4. Further propagation through social / lightweight blogging networks. Diaspora, Fediverse, Hubzilla, Friendica, etc.

Most of 3 & 4 would be automated.

  1. Interaction and engagement on a personal basis (largely replacing G+) through one of the federated social networks. If I can have a central management hub for those (and I've run across a platform that seems to offer that on a web-based basis, though I'd prefer a local desktop or command-line option), so much the better. The faster I can slice through mentions, comments, etc. the better.\ \ One thing I've ... somewhat ... liked about G+ is that on desktop it's modestly possible to address interactions directly through the Notifications pane. Considering Notifications as its own stream and giving a way to rapidly:
    1. See events.
    2. Filter by type.
    3. Respond immedately from the Notifications context (screen, pane, pop-up, whatevs, though I prefer a page rather than overlay).
    4. Expand context in the Notifications context as needed for more complex stuff.
    5. Dismiss immediately events of no interest. (With an undo for fumbling finger factor.)
    6. Where any administrative factors are presented, say, group management or moderator actions -- approving, banning, admonishing, etc., users or content -- those controls are also presented directly in the Notifications context.

(The lack of this is a major frustration on Reddit. It's pathologically bad for G+ Communities, do not even get me started.)

I think that's a big chunk of it.

Notifications are a key and underappreciated element in social engagement

If you want to engage with others, you have to be aware of what it is that they are doing. And in the unlikely event that there might possibly be any among the 7.3 billions of souls in this world you don't care to interact with, not being principally aware of what they're doing may prove helpful.

(Not being principally aware does not necessitate being unaware, as with a full block. Though that is frequently how the capability is implemented.)

A lightweight Notifs management as a secondary option could also be useful.

A gripe I have with Diaspora is that dealing with Notifs is slow. It's only a few seconds' lag, but that's seconds that don't have to be there. A <300ms target would be ideal. I'm getting ~3s, which is 10x worse, and which repeated 33 times (present notifs count) is three minutes spent just waiting for things to happen while I'm responding to Notifications. And in cases that bumps up 2-3x slower, or worse. Nine minutes of wait. And 33 notifs is light traffic, at least right now.

The models I'm thinking of are G+, Diaspora, Ello (which has had several variations of Notifications, and created then reverted the best I've ever seen, sort of a side-pane, Usenet reader (think Netscape's Usenet client, or rtin), Reddit, and Hacker News (great on everything except context, though limited to replies only). Mutt (console email client) is among the best interfaces I've ever seen, and some sort of local social-to-email gateway might address a few concerns / considerations.

Speaking of email and Usenet: among many factors which killed them (and there were many -- see "Why Usnet Died" at the Dreddit) was the fact that there was no standardisation of composing conventions. You had a few schools of this, but they interacted poorly:

  1. Top vs. bottom posting. Largely a Unix / Windows split.
  2. Indication of emphasis, with the underscore/star style in plain text (similar to AsciiDoc). Markdown actually breaks a few of these conventions but is ubiquitous enough to be useful.
  3. HTML vs. raw text.
  4. Line length. Still matters for some.
  5. Attachments.
  6. Other rich-text formats.

(I've discussed this in the past month or so with Matthew Graybosh on Mastodon as well, if that discussion is discoverable. I'm ... not finding it presently.)

Among the fundamental failures was a failure to come to a common agreement on interactions. I had a revelation when reading about Docker, a lightweight virtualisation system. The technology consists solely of an agreement on how to do things. All the pieces were already there.

Incidentally, many of the problems with email also plague Web content. Sites are maddeningly inconsistent and idiosyncratic in their use of HTML, document structure (DOM), CSS, style, metadata, JavaScript, external dependencies, and more. I'm highly aware of this both given my dislike of most online styling (I have a large local CSS library applied to fix sites) and in trying to create a useful research archive of >10,000 articles from various sources. "Pocket: it gets worse the more you use it" is one of several critiques I've written of this, and there may be a project to address the useful utilisation of the Web as a research and collaboration platform. You know, as it was intended to be.

Protocols and standardisation, like trust, are social glue.

They can also create problems. Protocols that become change-resistant stagnate development. There are examples of this and the communications and information fields are rife with these because standards and conventions of exchange are the essence of communications. Lewis Carroll and the White Rabbit's "Glory" are the antithesis of communication -- if you use symbols known only to yourself, you can communicate with no one.

(Groups, though, using conventions known only internally, create the capacity to operate independently of an outside environment. This is a tool, for good or bad. See RibbonFarm's essay on "legibility vs. illegibility.)

SMTP, NNTP, IRC, SMS, HTML, nroff/groff, DocBook, Markdown, LaTeX (an extension of TeX), proprietary office formats (consider in context of above parenthetical note), RSS, Atom, XHTML, HTML5, the Federation / Fediverse protocols, Mastodon, diff formats, revision control formats, git, SSH, PGP, MIME, TCP/IP, Slack. They're all (at least in part) protocols, some open, some closed, some dynamic and developing, some static, some interacting, some not, some encapsulating, some encapsulated.

(Programming languages and various other bits overlap with this in various ways.)

OK, that's enough for this morning's ramble.

#googleplus #plusrefugees #protocols #MorningRamble #longForm #plexodus

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