Can We Ever Reset the Field? ardisson.org
@smokey I found them all meaningful, but these 57 really hit home.
Just like in real life, where your bar trivia team doesn’t really overlap with your work softball team or your church bowling league, all of your online communities gathered in their own places, ones best suited to them, and you didn’t have to act as all facets of yourself simultaneously when trying to only interact with one.
@smokey I was thinking parallel thoughts yesterday and had started hashing out a post, but you framed the idea much better than I did. Decentralization by definition means that not everyone is in the same place, and that's a feature, not a bug. Wasn't the whole point of Indieweb to "surf" websites? This means we have to go out to find interesting people and different voices, instead of waiting for them to come to us on a single platform. It takes effort. I think it's worthwhile effort.
@smokey I have always sort of been late/delayed to the big social networks. And have always found that they have TOO much for me. In fact, I have held on to RSS feeds from my favorite sources and read them in a simple reader. I thought I was being old school, but after learning podcasts run off of RSS feeds, micro blog is based on it, and that there is often a way to get RSS feeds for other services (I am currently expermenting with various ways to get certain twitter and instagram users into my RSS, and so far so good). It is a bit of a pain to self-curate when there are so many sources out there, but I like the results.
@macgenie Glad you found it meaningful, Jean. I’ve been thinking about that forced overlap (I guess a form of context collapse?) for a while; I think perhaps as an introvert I’m more sensitive to it (or maybe it’s the fact I always had terrible luck mixing friend circles at birthday dinners and other social events throughout grad school?) It feels extra-exhausting, and limiting—I can’t say something that I want to say to one group, because another group wouldn’t understand, or would take it the wrong way, or….
@vega Thanks. We’ve been so conditioned to believe that it’s not a feature by places whose business models depend on having everyone in one place, and that has now distorted reality. I do hope we can overcome that conditioning, and I completely agree that the effort involved in finding people everywhere, wherever they are, is a worthwhile one.
@hexalspace I think a lot of people here on Micro.blog, particularly the early adopters who were active when I arrived, were also “old school” RSS afficianados, so you are in good company. And the options to get non-RSS items into RSS today, in spite of the silos, seem like they are better than they were pre-silos (because things that don’t do RSS often do have APIs); I think it was @amit the other day mentioning Yahoo! Pipes, which I remember reading about people using to perform all sorts of gymnastics to make things into RSS feeds back in the day!