Quoting @Chris G

Related tangent – I've wondered if there should be a much wider notion of "two-minute-week" – for instance, I'm not ready to post videos and show+tell – but would I post a little microblog update? No, because I'll just end up talking in a private sort of language that no one understands. But should I do that anyway?

Think about the original twitter status update, how it was a still-undefined format. Lunch and what's on tv and headed out and reading X, all became the first announcements. There weren't pictures of peoples' lunches back then!

I've often felt this same thing. #share-your-work and #two-minute-week feel like very structured places. #thinking-together and #linking-together have their own purposes. I've often wanted a place where I can share what I'm up to or thinking about without feeling the need to meet some bar. Now maybe its best that we don't do that. Maybe it is just noise. But since someone else mentioned it, I wanted to post about it. I was thinking something along the lines of #devlog-together. Only structure I might suggest is that people should post at most 1 top-level post per day. I know something like this would encourage me to share more. Would I share every day, probably not. But it would be a place I could share things that I don't feel meet the bar of those other channels. Thoughts? Good idea? Or just noise?

One problem I foresee: I've tried to read the Handmade Network Discord's #projects-showcase channel, and I think the reader's experience is quite poor. The updates are all fragmentary, and there's no easy way to drill down into an individual posting. Possible solution: I wish we could have per-project channels that could also roll up to an all-project river-of-news meta-channel. If we did that it'd be easier for people to browse lots of channels, and so we could spin up more channels than we do today, where our predominant reaction to new channels (justifiably) is, "create a new channel only if you want to lose all readership." In other words, if you could browse a meta-channel and also easily bounce to any update's context in its own private channel, that could be quite compelling, give them an opportunity to grow a story over time. Hmm, if we were to spin up lots of say "by-" channels, I could create a meta-channel to browse over at http://akkartik.name/archives/foc/ That might also give me the impetus to start using the Slack API, update the archives in real time. On the other hand, how would people remember to go to a whole new site? So maybe your idea is the right one. A #devlog-together channel where people can post updates with hashtags, and a link up top to some third-party viewer that segments the channel by hashtag. On the third hand, this is all over-engineering for our level of scale, which is much lower than HMN. Perhaps we should just try it and see what happens! We can always add third-party integrations down the road.

Yeah, I'd rather start simple and change from concrete pains. But also, let's be honest, this is for the writers benefit, not the readers.

True. My fear is that the writers will burn out if we're not able to foster at least a little engagement from readers.

I like the "1 post a day" limit. Maybe also a "aim for tweet length" guideline? If people want to go long, they can always dump a bunch in the replies to their top-level, or in a linked blog post.

Riffing on #garage-door-open, I've been thinking a lot about a #home-workshop (based on https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/christopher-alexanders-architecture) Not sure that's what we're going for here, though..

I think we'd still ask people to "paint a picture" – like how would you describe it to a friend over the phone, so that you could then have a little dialogue, pose a quandary, just enough to get back a "oh, that sounds like ... I always really like how ..." from peers

I mean, you can use the "also send to #channel" checkbox under the message box when composing a thread reply

This works. I used this approach with a huge thread on Mu spanning 2+ years: https://mastodon.social/@akkartik/103395953154615316 (Dec 2019) -- https://mastodon.social/@akkartik/105108305362341204 (Oct 2020) (I switched instances at this point.) https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/105201398493734213 (Nov 2020) -- https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/106858559854384210 (Aug 2021) (I tried doing the same on Twitter, but it seems to penalize the reach of long solipsistic threads.)

I like the “1 post a day” limit. Maybe also a “aim for tweet length” guideline?

#hundred-word-day

So I'd still vote for #devlog-together. Here's why. The goal isn't for a #random or #off-topic channel. The goal is for updates on work like #share-your-work and #two-minute-week but with just a lower barrier. All the other suggestions other than maybe #status-update don't seem to suggest that to me.

➡️ #devlog-together

Can we say FoC aspirational? For example, I'd write about some jit stuff. Not FoC yet. But I hope for it to be once I am good enough at it.

How should I word that, to convey the right thing in as few words as possible? I always struggle to articulate a line in the sand for what constitutes "on topic" in, like, 5 words.

I'd say the current channel description is fine? At least for now.

"90 days" was just due to the expectation that Slack would let go of content older than that... or who knows how expiration will actually work on older roots of threads One downside of doing devlog as an ongoing thread is that any contribution by others might feel like an interruption to the thread (and may actually be unhelpful noise, in some cases) Not using a thread means it won't really be possible to see older updates, including first/early posts which typically introduce the ideas (otherwise it'll need to be reintroduced, semi-frequently) Speaking of "posts", slack has a specific posts feature for longer pieces, but not seeing that as an option – really people just may need to keep a text file with their running thread, or something like that? Too bad micro.blog is a commercial product – and the real microblog, twitter, well if we just post threads there, cross-posting here wouldn't add much, we may as well just be following each other on twitter 😄 Still committed to trying and finding a way

Personally I've been using https://github.com/buckket/twtxt alongside Mastodon 🙂 Here's what it looks like: http://akkartik.name/twtxt.txt. So there are lots of options when you don't want the stream to be interrupted by others (or when you want to consume someone's updates without the peanut gallery). #devlog-together feels like an intermediate place, for conversations about projects. If we're fortunate enough to get them.