The true history of the world is the history of great conversations.
– Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister
I and some friends have started a movie forum/group. (Disclosure: it’s on software my company is writing. Dual purpose.) If you’re interested to talk movies every week or two, let me know if you’d like to join (barry at bjhess dot com). We’d love to have more folks involved such that the conversation gets going and gets interesting! Here’s the intro post.
@bjhess this sounds so interesting and tempting. Too much on my plate at the moment to participate but I hope it goes well!
@mbkriegh If you'd still like an invite, feel free to email me. Perfectly fine to lurk for now (or forever!).
@bjhess unclear why such strong focus on "private", surely you can't win on that axis vs. say Signal (or even WA) groups?
I'd only consider giving up E2EE if I gained huge jump forward in domain-specific design eg movie/book clubs (like in the way Album Whale is tailored to album lists)
@warner I don't remember the timing, but our home page has more words on it now, which may help clear things up a little.
Certainly we're not about private as a target for the über security conscious. Maybe we're missing the point on that? We're about private as in "I just want a private reading group to have discussions, and I don't want our writing indexed by search engines or lurked by non-participants."
Private isn't a strongly-held belief necessarily. It's a constraint that allows us to sit with this version for a while and see if it is useful to us and others. It's certainly possible that we bring in public groups as well down the road – the code is already there to do it.
In general we are not really thinking about "winning," but rather building something that is useful, hopefully to more than just a few people.
@bjhess good point that there's degrees of public (lmk if you have any ideas on AI indexing) and you'll wanna find your balance.
I just have a pet peeve about how BigTech mis-sold 'Direct' and 'Private' messages for past decade. And smart people like James Bartlett in 'Radical's parrots their language calling FB Groups (!) 'secret' groups.
If you wanted to avoid this, focus on word group eg "online discussions just for your group"