Homes from home
I’ve been away from home, on holiday. A good time to ruminate on open social web homes from home. Here’s five takeaways from the last couple of weeks.
One. Blacksky
Blacksky is winning aclaim for its nascent Bluesky decentralisation: the rsky implementation; a blacksky.community app and PDS; the atproto.africa relay; an in-house migration tool; and layers of moderation. Plus a People’s Assembly. What’s had less attention is a subtle shift in the way the new app works. When users sign in, their default home timeline is the Blacksky Feed. Immersing them immediately in the community, and everything Blacksky.
Two. Swiping through cards
In another part of the ATmosphere, Anisota launched a radical new interface. Posts are cards you swipe through horizontally, curate and share. There’s a moth theme, a nature soundtrack and a stamina-based shut down system to limit excessive browsing. Laurens Hof has done a good write up here. It's certainly different.
Three. Maps
Back in the Fediverse, Raghav Agrawal posted this:
What if instead of linear feeds, social media had a map view?
A bird's-eye view of idea flows, not based on what's popular but where they converge and diverge based on themes and topics you are interested in?
Outsiders can see the cracks → where to enter.
Insiders can trace the genealogy → where ideas mutated.
The collective can see itself thinking, not just consuming.
Scenius becomes tangible, not accidental.
… You'd see a topology of how ideas connect, flow, and transform and identify bridges between separate communities.
Another radical approach to the timeline.
Four. Facebook Groups
Over the summer I’ve stayed on-and-off in the house where I was born, and the town where I grew up. My nephew recommended I check out the town Facebook Group, so I joined. It’s a familiar mix of lost property, small business adverts, and this classic, posted last week:
Whoevers going round keying cars better come forward and own up or there’s gonna be a lot of trouble when I find out.
Based on a quick sample, most of the 8,800 members are not active Facebook users. Like me, they’ve joined just for the town crack. This is their home page. No follows needed. As soon as you join, you’re immersed. Car keying and all.
Five. Community journalism
On holiday I stumbled across the Provincetown Independent, a vibrant weekly newspaper for the outer Cape, in the US. A home for community journalism, offering a rather more civilised, curated take on the locality than my hometown Facebook Group, but one which is equally immersive. The thing about neighbourhoods is, there’s always something going on…
What can the Fediverse learn from all this? Here’s five things.
One. There are many kinds of home
The Fediverse celebrates diversity. As Jaz-Michael King eloquently put it, there are a million Fediverses, not one. So why is everyone so wedded to the tyranny of the home timeline? The black hole of the Matrix-verse? New users fill the void first with random high profile accounts, then random people who follow them back when they dare to make a post, or seem vaguely interesting. Successful, welcoming Third Places are more like forests or beaches, where you immediately feel immersed. If that’s too quiet, they can be nightclubs playing your kind of music, or a sports stadium packed for a home game. Total immersion. Each of the diverse examples above offers this.
Two. Curation helps
Power users do this themselves. That’s why they love a non-algorithmic timeline. They can follow hashtags, move follows to lists, add in keyword filters. The uber-power users turn to Phanpy’s catch-up. A brilliant example of an alternative home on the Fediverse. With one catch: you need a curated time line of multiple favourite users before it becomes useful. So far, that's limited its reach.
For the rest of the world, the five take-outs above offer alternative, curated welcomes, each a lot more immersive than a black hole.
Three. Tag Channels open up conversations
Before hashtag cramming became the norm, hashtags started out as Tag Channels. They opened up interesting spaces and conversations. Hashtag communities like #SilentSunday and #Monsterdon are small hold-outs of this old-school way of doing things. We could do with many more - which is why Bluesky Community Feeds and Farcaster Channels are so powerful.
Four. Local can become a mish-mash
When curation is limited to localisation, it can quickly become an overwhelming mish-mash. A red star to replace the black hole. Excited by my hometown Facebook Group, I looked for a similar group in a city where we’re working. Only to find that one cohesive group had splintered into many, all over-run with local business posts. Some Fediverse servers police this by asking for posts on local topics only, but why should my home on the social web prevent me from participating in wider debates? It’s only doing this due to technical limitations - the local timeline can’t be curated.
Tim Chambers sin of Timeline Turmoil is an alternate expression of this problem. Alongside the empty home timeline, we add a mish-mash of content in two extra timelines. Which doesn't help anyone.
Five. Instant immersion
Users today want instant immersion. TikTok is the ultimate example - but we don't have to make the individual the centre of everything to escape the timeline void, and offer welcoming Third Spaces. From Blacksky to my hometown Facebook Group, Anisota to the Provincetown Indie, and feed readers to blogging newsletters, there are collective, curated ways to create immersive online experiences, connecting users to communities.
Where does this take us?
The easy waves of migration from old social media are done. The pioneers who were happy to make the break have moved. Leaving Bluesky, the Fediverse and open social micro-blogging 1.0 already mature, with Threads a giant dead end.
To reach Johannes Ernst’s millions and billions, we need to do something different. Instant immersion in content and community is one suggestion. Helping people feel welcome, safe, and looked after. At home. A nice idea to come back to.