Are groups the future of communities on ssb?

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I have been giving some thought to the problem of new user overload. I recently replied to an issue on the patchwork github about making it easier to find pubs in Patchwork. I think my response came across as quite dismissive. I tried to justify my response, but I have since realised that I was missing a major vital part of what has evolved here.

The general answer to this has been, we are waiting for proper user invites, then people can create their own communities, and won't bother us anymore. However, I think that this might only be half of the solution.

A lot of people that (currently) want to join ssb aren't interested in bringing their current social network. They want to find new people and new ideas.

Almost everyone here right now was at once a stranger. What brought us together?

I think what we desperately need are real groups. A lot like how reddit treats sub-reddits.

Right now the majority of people "joining" SSB have joined the group "Secure Scuttlebutt" people interested in the technlogy of SSB. In the process they have met new friends and discovered additional groups "solarpunk", "feminism", "boats".

The other side of this is that if someone wants to discuss Patchwork features on SSB, they have to first find some pub, and then hope they can hop their way to a part of the network that contains a lot of Patchwork developers. They need to step around various other discussions (that they might have unfortunate opinions about). They might not realise that the part of the network they are connected to might not even have any Patchwork devs. They might be yelling into the void. If they could just join the "Patchwork Dev" group, this wouldn't be a problem.

We need to start framing joining SSB as either finding your friends, or joining a group. There is no just joining ssb. That's like saying joining the internet. I think that people will indeed make friends through groups. These will function a lot like pubs do right now, except that it will no longer be luck-of-the-draw connections. Instead these people will already have shared interests.

I can also see a lot of potential for providing roles and moderation features on these groups.

And of course, there will be people that want to communicate with their friends from "real life". User invites will allow them to use SSB as a Facebook style social network. But this will take a lot longer to become as useful as Facebook as it requires some kind of market share in a given network. But we already have thriving groups emerging. These evolved on their own, and we should embrace this and make it official.

We need to figure out exactly what a group on SSB is, and we need to find a way to advertise these outside of SSB and allow invites to be shared publicly and privately.

#patchwork #ssb #groups #community #new-people

@reilly

What you propose is quite similar my pub based groups proposal from a while back. There was some discussion about whether a pub should be able to handle multiple groups (people generally agreed, yes). And ideally it should be possible to move a group to a different pub later (or avoid depending on a single one).

What's great about just using a pub as a group is that we can use the existing invite system. This ends up mostly just reframing what pubs are. Like you say, some UI tweaks are needed to be able to organise the content correctly in terms of these group pubs.

I think this is something we should take another look at.

@mmckegg

Almost everyone here right now was at once a stranger. What brought us together?
I think what we desperately need are real groups. A lot like how reddit treats sub-reddits.

Agreed and agreed.

By design, SSB connects you with:

• People that are a few hops away from your self-declared friends.

There is also the social need for connecting you with:

• People that are a few hops away from your self-declared interests.

And for that we need to consider how to solve "stranger discovery", and we need to reconsider the benefit of DHTs for that. The upside of DHTs is that they connect you with strangers, the downside is that they connect you with strangers. (No typo!) It would be pretty straight forward to use mafintosh's discovery-channel to join a swarm of peers that follow the same interest, channel food or dogs or whatever, and it would de facto work like hashtags on twitter, helping you find people using the same string.

The problem with DHTs in the context of SSB is that getting data from those people would happen by "friending" them on the same intimacy status as your real friends, which would in turn trigger SSB to replicate those stranger's data to your friends, etc. There should be a way of having ephemeral replication.

I think this has to do with an idea I proposed: hop configuration should be per-friend, not globally. I should be able to say: follow dominic and also replicate all of his friend's data because I know dominic represents a community I want to be part of. But also I should be able to say: follow this rando for a while, but only them and none of their friends, I'll try this for a while without commitment and see if it'll be interesting or not. I almost feel like there should be a way of putting out-of-order together with DHTs and 0-hop configuration in order to build some sort of twitter hashtag equivalent use case to meet people who are posting under the same channel.

Also, this shouldn't be in conflict with how things currently work, because I should be able to make that rando a real friend and choose to opt-in to multi-hop replication from their circles, that kind of stuff.

There's no reason scuttlebutt.nz needs to be the primary entrance to all possible SSB communities

Thumbs up. Every time we say "SSB" it should sound like saying "RSS": just a technology that is cool and useful, but by itself empty of humanity (and it should be so). When we say something else, like Solarpunk, that should evoke much more humanity and community feelings.

There used to be a irc channel that was the node.js "mad science" channel. We never advertised or promoted it, but whenever I met someone who was doing really cool stuff in javascript, I would invite them to it. ssb grew out of that IRC channel! (also, dat and webtorrent). But I remember once someone told me, they joined the channel, but because they perceived the other people there to be too "elite", they were shy about actually saying anything. So we created a few other channels that were focused more specifically - and then those channels became thriving little communities. We actually need groups so that people can have a place to feel like they are the first ones in the club.

So, paradoxally I think the way to scale scuttlebutt as a whole is to have ways to enable small groups.

cc @MissSophie - I think our brainchild of sub:galaxies for tale:net also goes into this direction.

[1%] cristalizing more responses...

Go play this group dynamics thing ncase just posted : %sRJ0lAo...

I think it will inform this conversation

Question on altnets: can i take this identity here over into an altnet and back?

If you could then that would be nice but might also meanyou end up bleeding other people's content through if it's in your log.

If they're totally isolated then you end up with some dynamic like slack orgs, which I really dislike (way to disconnected.. i want those groups to be able to bleed into each other more)

Point #1: Communities should be organically mobile and decoupled from technical reifications.

I really strongly agree with this point @arcfide put so well. I love the redundency and flexibility pubs currently afford... they highlight how truly human-centric this protocol is

We dont need physical groups, but concentrated topics to draw like-minded people's attention together.

hi @lambdaq, who is "we"?