I like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro" communities. https://micro.mu. We limit groups to 20 people. I think that's an ideal number for real connections. Need more, it's likely for a different type of communication.
I think what ruins communities is large sustained growth and not size.
Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days.
What kills most mainstream social media is needing to show growth to investors. This turns them from a village with familiar faces into a train station where everyone is always passing through and there are no shared values or experiences.
It's assimilation speed and has been seen time and time again in various contexts.
If I take my American family and move to Australia, we will become Australian over time.
If I take my family and the entire city I live in to Australia, there will be an American city in Australia.
Eternal September is just when the influx overwhelmed the "carrying capacity" of Usenet, and anyone who has been on any forum for a length of time can refer to a similar influx (often complaining that everything has gone to crap since then).
Assimilation speed versus rate of joining versus rate of people leaving all need to be kept in balance to have a long running, tight-knit community. An interesting example is university clubs: they have the intrinsic property that people's tenure in the club is very finite, typically a maximum of 4 years. Despite this constant turnover of membership, clubs tend to maintain a relatively constant culture. I posit that the main driver behind this is deliberate accelerated assimilation.
Right out of the gates, you have selection bias in who wants to be in your club: probably people who share many of the same interests as the club. Then you have further selection pressure with inviting new membership: existing members are more likely to accept into the organization prospective members who are similar to themselves, or at least, an idealized version. Then, you have rituals, ranging from hazing to positive Big/Little type interactions, which proactively push new members to assimilate into the club.
Those are good points; a university club almost by definition has 25% turn over each year, but it's scheduled, defined, and worked around. People don't usually just disappear; they hand off responsibilities and train, either explicitly or implicitly.
It probably boils down to mathematics. If your average interaction is with someone you've never met before, it's very difficult for persistent relations to form.
> Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days.
Man, with me on the edge to nuking or not nuking my reddit account with a couple of smaller communities, I didn't need more nostalgia back here. I was part of the "night crew" over on the old freenode in a few tech channels since I'm from europe and the times I have time ended up being when the US was asleep, haha. Learned to much about a couple of topics over that time as well. I still know way too many arcane weirdnesses and internals of python from stints on #python.
Or old TF2/Tremulous/CS1.6/Quake servers. Times when we could call truces over voice to get us another beer and the other guy wouldn't come 'round the corner. And then you'd discuss current brand choices for a second. Or when one of the local pros started to take you seriously and would start some impromptu coaching, which usually involved a lot of death on your side because now they were looking for you.
Man, I learned so much about good architecture from just hanging out on Freenode in a few programming channels.
At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right?
Those were simpler times, I suppose. We were working with all the new frameworks of the day, and it was the grizzled old engineers alongside the young hotshots — and none of it mattered, because all anyone saw was your nick and your code. You'd put some interesting snippet up on one of those anonymous paste sites, and the critique would roll in.
I don't know how kids these days learn about dependency injection, the downsides of singleton architectures, the art of API design, or the nuanced tradeoffs of using an ORM to abstract over a relational model. But I rather enjoyed learning it all "on the streets" of IRC — frankly a far more welcoming and engineering-focused atmosphere than many tech companies.
> something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right?
It was a netsplit.
Freenode was sold to an heir of the former Korean monarchy. The idea that the network was even sellable did not resonate with several former staff calling it a hostile takeover, so Libera.Chat was formed as a moral successor.
The split caused a drop in user count from ~80k to ~45k. Some channels migrated to OFTC instead. See a user count history graph:
> At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right?
There was some .. lets just call it, rather encouraged rebranding to libra.chat. And there is something else namesquatting the freenode name.
I think the fact that server-based matchmaking is seperated in the way it is lends itself to those types of close-knit communities forming. MMOs with things like instancing implemented cause clusters like that to not form. You get that a little bit in capital cities in games like FFXIV and low-population WoW servers, but it's an unfortunate drawback for features to help with scaling.
That's good insight and similar to my own experiences. I spent time on various forums in the late 90s and early 00s. It was a golden experience and I got to know a lot of the members there. You had the usual suspects chatting amongst all the lurkers. The model was far superior to the type chat systems were using today to build similar communities.
I did the VC funded thing and personally don't want to go back to it. I also don't really care about the high growth thing but being sustainable is important. Sustained growth and profitability at least means the thing can be around for a while. I also think it comes down to the values of the creators of any platform. At what point are they going to sell out and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is in the service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I think the only way to mitigate that is structure the project and team in a way to support it. So if you get on the VC hamster wheel, there's no path but hyper growth. If you go against it and say, run a really normal business or even a social enterprise (aka non profit), maybe it actually benefits the people it's in service of.
> I also think it comes down to the values of the creators of any platform. At what point are they going to sell out and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is in the service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I think the only way to mitigate that is structure the project and team in a way to support it.
This is the crux of why we can't have nice things, and I've been thinking a lot about it. There are so many dynamics that trend towards corporate consolidation and ultimately the alienating effects of modern technology. The money to be made combined with rapid global scalability and network lock-in effects, mean that it's an uphill fight the whole way.
The bright spot is that so many technologists are disgusted with the direction tech has taken, and we have the know-how and agency to build alternatives. In order to address the selling out problem, I think we need to establish some standardized and well understood commitments to shepherding projects, products and companies that have some real teeth while not requiring a vow of poverty to maintain.
The other key piece is finding the right hooks to get normals using these products and not just defaulting to the big tech alternatives due to friction. This is the hardest part by far, but I feel there is enough general frustration with big tech that will be possible to harness in some way. The key will be some kind of killer app that appeals to enough people to gain critical mass.
And one more thing to think of, how to make this new good product resistant to EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish). Because you want to make it open, this means it's open to multi billion corporations who can throw lots of $$$ and build a nicer client really fast. And from there, well we know how it goes.
In ye olden days the whole world didn’t exist. Maps indicated ‘here be dragons’.
I feel you though, marginalia, and appreciate your work. I wrote a search engine too once and after a few months of me not using it myself, gave up. My results were too specific and not broad enough to include the world.
This! Why is it everything we build is to communicate with the world? The reality is we live in a certain physical space, we can only see, hear and speak at a certain distance and while technology has enabled a way to overcome that, it does feel like we're overwhelmed by the scale of humans we can communicate with. I want to go back to real, small, private connection. Hence micro.
> Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution.
Even if the whole world isn't built this way, much of it could be, especially groups and interactions.
It’s what you said. The real world. Meet a friend. It’s as private as it gets.
Pick a small friend for true micro experience. :D
Jokes aside, unplug. And it doesn’t have to be that we build things at a world scale. But isn’t it amazing that we can and do build stuff at this scale.
Devs often don’t use tech as much as regular users! They build, and forget the use.
The world still doesn't really exist. At least not in any where we can comprehend it. Since it is almost certainly incomprehensible and probably not even possible to capture the world as it is, then isn't the second best to build something that is nice?
Aw come on now, don’t play coy, you know what I meant :)
That just as we went from hunting and gathering to farms and now cities, internet grew from a few people having access in universities and some tech corporations, to now phones in the hands of children in villages.
Let’s be more inclusive and dare I say progressive even?
20 seems a bit low. what happens if i want to invite 21 people?
many groups have a few active people and many less active people. one group i am in has about 80 members, 10-20 or which are active and keep a steady stream of communication. if the group were to grow much beyond that, it would be to much.
so you are right that 20 active people is a good group size but if there is a technical limit of 20 that means i have to police all the inactive people in order to have room for active people. seems to create more overhead than i'd be comfortable with.
wechat groups have a limit of 500 people. it's big enough to allow some flexibility for groups that have lots of members but little communication, but don't allow the groups to get so large as to get out of hand. the ideal technical limit for me is somewhere between 100 and 500. less than that and i'd run into to many corner cases because some group somewhere hit the limit. most of the groups i am active in have less than 100 members, but many have more than 20, but i am also in some groups that have more than 200 members, most of which are just reading and a few contributing.
The other thing I noticed that in let's say "stable" communities (slow growth, many long term members) there is much more of self-policing going. If someone acts outside of the implicit or explicit rules there is bigger chance someone would respond to that in "hey, behave, we don't do that here" comment and 9/10 that's enough, no mod involvement is needed, no bans or other punishment needs to be applied.
When community is a lot of "random people off the street" (no effort to create account or join, just start writing) that happens much more rarely
The 20 limit was really based on personal experience in the sense that those are 20 really high fidelity connections with people you know and interact with in a way that's more powerful than the network of 100 interrelated people. So if I have a close friend group of less than 20, in fact more like 12-15, I know that's going to be a tight knit group. Whereas if I open that up to 100, it might be more generically based around some interest like "tech dads" with passive conversation but mostly dominated by the vocal minority. Maybe there's a place for that but I'd be interested to learn and see the limits myself before opening it up. Or just charge for that 100 member group.
I know in a community setting you have more passive members than not. I just don't know if I want to start out enabling that before having really solid admin and moderation tools.
"Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships."
For Wechat specifically, I think that the group size limit of 500 may be related to Chinese law. They want group sizes to remain somewhat small to prevent news from spreading too quickly.
Correct, because over that size a number of censorship and monitoring requirements come into play. A lot of WeChat's early success was focused around keeping things more private. The 500 limit is part of that.
what would be interesting is a feature where the moderators can limit the group size. start with 20, and if that limit is almost reached, have an option to raise it. by that time a moderator will have an idea if the group can handle more growth or not.
It's not meant as a replacement to signal or WhatsApp but more a compliment for the "community" aspects which often just get lumped into a group. Community discussions usually breakdown by topic and so that's how micro chat is organised.
The big bubbly space-inefficient chatroom UI you're using seems so irrelevant/obsolete here. It already makes me stressed out, thinking of dealing with an SMS group on my iPhone of 20 people. It'd be the worst possible user experience to engage with a meaningful community in a meaningful way over time.
This is a cool idea and a nice looking implementation. I have a Signal group chat that I've been trying to find a slightly better home for, one feature I think we desperately need is a community calendar; some way that we can create and coordinate big group events beyond just spinning off an invitee chat or something. I see that you call out event-focused groups here, is there any tooling that would support actually planning the events and seeing what's happening over a short time period?
Good eye. Yes we're thinking about that already. I think when we think about this tool from a community and even family or friends perspective, keeping track of everything you're doing or need to do becomes difficult even if you're living by the calendar. It's because that calendar isn't shared. So I think for us "events" is something we want to find a way to integrate at the core of the experience. That at to-dos, because mostly when you have some event, there's still some level of planning to get done before it.
Sweet! Yeah my partner and I have made a shift to keep our lives in our personal calendars which has been a huge QoL upgrade for us, but it's still so hard to keep track of who in the friend group is available when, as well as keep everyone remembering what's coming up in the next week or so. I feel like this was the biggest value+add of Facebook, but that particular product is now all but unusable :(. Adding shared, event-level to-do lists to a calendar tool would be absolutely KILLER, we just planned a big group camping trip and it was an enormous headache to track who was riding with who, who was bringing food, wood, etc. Having even just one or two simple tools to coordinate all that would have been a lifesaver. Definitely looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
Thanks that's super interesting to hear! I think we sort of share this pain and spent 4-5 months basically riffing about it while working on other ideas. It definitely solves a personal pain and feels like everyone is missing this tool to manage life in a community setting.
AFAIK NextCloud aims to replace something like Google Calendar, but this isn't exactly what I'm after. What I really need is something that replaces FB Events. I want to be able to create a distinct event, with like a page, time, and location where invitees can coordinate stuff, post pictures, etc. I'd then like for these events to be aggregated into a single place, which is the shared group calendar. Self-hosting a replacement for the GSuite would kind of solve this need, people could use Signal for chat and post pictures to NextCloud, but overall seems misaligned with the featureset I'm seeking.
Ah I see, in that case NC probably is a bit of a misfit. There is a plugin named Announcement Center that will do something like that, but I guess it would be a hack:
Dunbar's number is 150, which seems about right for the number of people to be involved for the group to end up devolving into two macro communities. The micro-communities still hover round the 2 to 5 mark where everyone gets to feel like they're participating and appreciated.
So it's private and invite only by default. There is no element of "public" and the focus is on real connections with people you know rather than people you've never met in person. There's also no notifications or "is typing". The goal is really not to try emulate existing chat or bombard you with the need for immediate replies. It's a lot more focused on how most of our lives and mine personally operates now which is with less reaction and more laid back. Group sizes are also capped at 20.
Trying to use this, I get an error when entering a group. Seems like a cool idea, but it needs to have a lot more functionality to draw me in, I think.
There's no end to end encryption right now but it's interesting the thought immediately goes there. This is not a replacement for signal, WhatsApp, etc. It's more like an advancement on forums or replacement for Facebook groups that takes things private in the sense that it's invite only and no one outside your group can talk to you. The recent community chats product from Facebook has also foregone end to end encryption because they want to be able to centralise the tech and moderation as it's much simpler for group products. Again this is not a replacement for whatsapp, signal or related messengers.
Difficult to have "real connections" in a small, intimate group if you know you're being watched. Putting a 1984 telescreen in the room has a chilling effect. Without E2EE that's what you are building.
Small, encrypted groups with people you know makes sense (like Signal). Large, unencrypted, open groups make sense (like reddit, facebook groups). I don't understand how you're trying to make something with parts of each, it doesnt make sense to me
Do you believe slack messages are private? Or DMs on twitter? How about the content you store on Notion or Google docs. I guess what I'm saying is there's a lot of places where it doesn't matter as long as your data is stored securely and privately in a way that no one can access it and the operators are not mistreating it. At the end of the day we still need a way to ensure certain terrible content never exists on the platform which is illegal but we're also doing this because we're not happy with the state of corporate run systems at the moment. I think there's the potential for a "community interest" platform where we actually trust the people who run it and they're totally aligned in doing it for the public good. I'm still figuring out how to convey that message more broadly to people.
>Do you believe slack messages are private? Or DMs on twitter? How about the content you store on Notion or Google docs.
No, so I would never choose to use them for communications with my intimate small groups, and nobody should.
>securely and privately
You cannot do that without E2EE. There are hacks constantly, if you have any security awareness.
>At the end of the day we still need a way to ensure certain terrible content never exists on the platform which is illegal
E2EE is not illegal and in reasonable jurisdictions you can simply have a report function so users can report something if they see it in their groups.
>totally aligned in doing it for the public good
Given your posture on E2EE, you seem to have a completely different alignment than me and I would expect most hackers who tend to see the issues with mass surveillance and how difficult it is to make a secure platform. You seem to be intent on wanting people to just trust that you'll never sell the business and all the communication history, for confusing reasons
> You seem to be intent on wanting people to just trust that you'll never sell the business and all the communication history, for confusing reasons
I think the words "just trust" here are not right. No I don't want people to "just" trust me because I wouldn't "just" trust someone else. I think the E2E thing is important but we already have platforms that facilitate this really well. If it's technically feasible to do in a way that doesn't slow product development, sure we'd do it, but if it's going to take me months on end and it will largely hinder a lot of what we're trying to build feature wise, then it's not really worth it. I think where pure privacy on that level is important to people they really should pick signal or similar. For me, I think what's more important is, can I trust the people running this platform to host that infrastructure well, to continue to put the community first and to drive maybe an alternative path that a lot of people are about e.g self host the data part. Self hosting comes up a lot but in the context of "I want to host the whole thing", what if it was just, where the data lives. At the same time, we're really thinking consumer first and no consumer wants to host anything, they're quite happy using existing services and E2E is not the first thing they think about, it's the frictionless communication or the features of the service. In the case where the consumer really cares about E2E its because they're doing something they don't want anyone to know about. Saying all this, look if I'm putting my personal details into it, or family photos, etc. I want to know no one is going to see or touch that, but maybe it's as basic as we use AES-256 on the client side and a randomly generated secret, or we just delete the data after 30 days and that's the policy.
I think there are services that really focused heavily on E2E but their goal was purely communication whereas we're sort of pushing towards doing more around community coordination.
