probably the disconnect here is that implementers are more or less starting from a foundation of “what we have now is good and workable, how can we build on it further” but i am more often starting from a foundation of “what we have now is bad and unworkable, how can i identify and fix the problems”

what i really want to think about is higher-level than just “mastodon feature x” or “federation of aspect y”. i just feel like this all isn’t working the way i want it to and i am not having my human needs met by the current architecture and paradigm; it doesn’t “spark joy” and i’m not sure what the value i’m supposed to be getting out of this is supposed to be, when my experience on fedi has actually declined progressively in the past however-many years.

what i think i’d pose to everyone as a question is: what are you here for? because it’s not like we’re all here for the same things, and therefore the goals and visions of what we’re trying to build are not aligned. and more generally: what are you trying to do? and why?

i ask this almost more from a sociological perspective rather than a technological one. at the level of *people*, how do you envision things working?

for me, i want to find cool people to talk to and i want to have mutual understanding with them. a sort of companionship that social media sometimes delivers on and sometimes horribly obscures.

the good part is when people spill their thoughts into the void, and implicitly invite interaction, which acts as a social lubricant and facilitates triadic closure: A and B both connect to C, and in turn, A and B are therefore more likely to connect with each other.

why am i posting this as a reply-chain on social media and not as a single article on my website? because it’s easier.

why is it easier? mostly a lack of formality. partly because of the atomization of a chain-of-thought.

how can i replicate those effects outside of the paradigm of social media? that’s what i want to explore. i want to make it easier to communicate in whatever paradigm makes the most sense using generic patterns that apply across paradigms.

i think i might conceive of these kinds of “dump my thoughts in a reply-chain” as the minimum workable unit of what is more precisely a form of commonplace book or entry log. i don’t think it fits into a feed format, but it might fit if i made a page for it. i just don’t like the bucket being “by date”, because i am really bad with dates. maybe borrowing the concept of a “thread” from forums makes more sense to me. but each post is less its own resource and more a fragment of the larger resource

subsequently, i would not necessarily want to notify everyone of every single resource or resource fragment. i would want to be able to send the notification whenever i decided “it is done”.

this is i think what the Announce activity may have been intended for? as a way to decouple the act of creation from the act of sharing. but just as validly, you could delay the notification of creation? these are finer details that can be teased out by implementations on behalf of users.