decompose “social media” into 1) actual contextual communication spaces, and 2) discovery methods for finding or meeting new people

the 1st feels more approachable because the theory exists and can be applied

but the 2nd feels a lot harder to “solve” in an organic way without venues explicitly set up for this purpose (and what would those look like)

like the question of “how do i publish, message, read etc” is more or less straightforward irl. but the question of “how do i find or meet new people” is something for which i have no analogy

maybe it’s my social awkwardness but i just can’t visualize a realistic answer that i could emulate digitally. institutionally i am vaguely aware of people being introduced via school or work or whatever. but that kinda sucks as a primary model for meeting people

@trwnh what about forums of variable sizes and scopes. arbitrary groups seems to be a constantly emerging in any case. but people need fluidity about it (easy to start, easy to share, easy to join, easy to leave)

i would even posit that this 2nd point is the *only* thing that twitterlikes are good for. they’re strictly worse on every other metric for actual communication

@alice forums are good but they work a lot better when they’re bound by some general interest or demographic. you could with some stretching construe twitterlikes as a (very sparse and context-free) public forum, but a lot of the heavy lifting is being done by subcultures rather than the venue itself

@trwnh yea thats a bit what i mean. by letting people play with the variable size unconstrained they can find their own balances, i think. people will want small groups and big groups (to emulate the twitter promise, altho instead of the 'implicit everyone' there is a less impressive 'explicit many people', that i believe fill the exact same role). just like there were niche subreddits and 'front page class' subreddits and old forums with 20 friends and some that were 'the implicit (topic or location scoped) public place'

since this point came up: forums can do this, insofar as they model interest or affinity groups. but it’s hard to do a public generalist forum in a good way

@alice “topic or location scoped” is something i wonder if it can be extracted. like i guess that mostly leaves just “audience scoped” but i do find it hard to keep a good general/offtopic chat going without any specific topic etc

“general/offtopic channel” kinda works too but that’s highly dependent on audience and also it’s hard to do it in a way that doesn’t implicitly fallback to topicality or otherwise die off

@trwnh yea i wonder if there even needs to be anything in this precise place, like, what if the previous websites just had to justify this space that they made but no one asked for. maybe the best general forum is the one that's about its members, and it doesnt make much sense at larger scales. more personally i feel 'to my contacts' (+ possibly to their contacts by proxy) or 'to ppl interacting with a specific topic/location/need/etc' are already a complete social tool kit

@trwnh most folks i know meet new friends via their existing friends. iirc this is the core idea behind facebook’s original “you may know” feature, which evolved into the general discovery mechanism for that platform. could generalize this idea to people who tend to interact with the same sites/topics/posts.

@alice i take the view that "to my contacts" is the kind of thing you would publish on your blog etc for. this is inherently different than having a discussion about nothing in particular

@tech_himbo sure but where do you start? like a new person showing up without knowing anyone. this is the equivalent of like "i just moved to a new city and i know zero people there" -- how do you meet your first friend? your first 10 friends?

@trwnh this is where the web has an edge. most “getting started” UIs ask users for a list of interests, then present a few topics/accounts to follow. the closest real-world analogy for this is hanging out at a place where you know the crowd has something in common. but in the real world, you have to do this by trial-and-error, because you don’t really know what people in a crowd like without talking to them. online, you can learn someone’s interests via the stuff they post and interact with

@tech_himbo that's true but i'm more wondering about the contexts in which you might discover existence (before digging deeper). the only answer i can come up with is something like directories, which is a bit indirect in that you have to crawl a bunch of links which can be overwhelming

@trwnh by “discover existence,” do you mean the existence of a specific person you’d like to talk to? (as opposed to a good post or a neat forum)

@tech_himbo discover a blog, a forum, a website, whatever -- there is an eventual path to "subscribe to see more publications from this person" or "connect with this person to message them" or whatever. but you gotta start somewhere on the Social Web, and i think we need to have a better answer than just "directories"

@tech_himbo like making friends might be the end goal here but to do that you have to meet people

@trwnh the evolution of this over time was:
- directory (stream of raw data)
- feed aggregator (combining streams)
- hand-written filtering rules (e.g. “posts tagged ‘music’”)
- ranking based on crowdsourced data (reviews, upvotes, etc)
- recommendation engines

each step gives a view on a larger data set, with more advanced filtering and relevance ranking. this is needed to scale. imo, if we reinvent directories today, we’ll reinvent recommendation engines tomorrow