[The following is a chat log from a Slack group]
How’s this for a new social network?
- There are no likes
- There are no followers or “friends”; they’re called contacts
- There are no “re-posts”; you can only share someone else’s post with your contacts and add your comment to it (similar to Tiwtter’s quote-tweet), but people can’t reply to your “share”. Your “share” of the post appears under the original post’s replies, and any time someone who saw you share the post would want to discuss it, replies have to be made on the original post.
sounds fancy. I "like" the no-likes part. Would the contact thing be equal to what we currently call "mutuals"? i.e. both parts have to actively seek the connection.
and the "commenting reposts" as a fancy reply is very nice. It's basically a visibility setting on your reply, but should obviously be branded as a share/quote post. Only thing is that I fear people would misuse it to share stuff with empty comments, just to have their contacts see it.
Oh, and add groups, so you wouldn't have to follow strangers, but can just join the groups they're active in.
I had another idea last night.
What do you think about “topics”? I was thinking about how Twitter is just many posts with no organization whatsoever. You have your set of posts, and other people have their set of posts, and your timeline is just the union of many people’s posts.
So with topics:
- You’d have one view of your timeline, just like in Masto or Twitter, which are just your top-level posts—a loose set of posts not belonging to any topic
- You’d have, side by side with the timeline view, a view of every active topic you or your contacts have started.
- You can see an activity indicator on each topic if you have unread posts there
- You can start a “blank” topic or you can turn a conversation or post in the timeline into a topic
- You can end topics manually but topics also expire after some amount of time has passed and no one has said anything in there
That way, topics mirror more or less how topics work IRL. Like when you’re at a party or in a bar, and your friends are talking about something, and you have something to say about it, you just join the conversation. And eventually, people move on to other topics, etc.
Oooh, that's a fancy idea! I like it. It feels like it's something between a thread and a hashtag.
I imagine that topics are kinda like hashtags with unique identifiers, so that just calling it the same thing doesn't make it the same topic;
If I create one or more topics with my post, then you'd be able to reply to my post in one or more of those topics. Or you'd be able to see which topics your friends are talking about, and say something in that topic. But you can't invade the topics of strangers, because you haven't seen that topic!
So a topic is more than a hashtag in that i actually gives a form of context to the post, while being less than a thread, because multiple posts can be written in a topic without them being replies to each other!
I love that you're coming up with an actually fresh way of desgning social interaction!
Yes, exactly! More than a hashtag, less than a thread. And I’d like to think it would invite conversation, rather than just gut- or meaningless reactions. It would feel more like you’re being social, and a part of something, rather than being fed random content (as in Twitter) or being exposed to some perfectly curated staging of other people’s lives (as in Facebook).