I just noticed people on the Concatenative Discord...
# administrivia
k
I just noticed people on the Concatenative Discord doing something really cool. It being Discord, you can group channels. So there's a group called Labs, and under it anyone can create a channel for themselves, like #clarity-lab or #capitals-cool-corner. It's like a per-person #C03RR0W5DGC, but the goal is subtly different if I look back at the genesis of that channel. The fact that there's no aggregation means you can basically assume nobody will see what you post there. But you can go back and link to something if it becomes relevant. This feels like it better captures the Christopher-Alexander ethos of #garage-door-open that we also alluded to in that thread. In 2024 I spent a certain amount of effort creating a devlog for myself on my own site. But it still feels like a site and so something more heavy. A chat might work better as a lab notebook. I'm not sure chat would work for me, it doesn't feel natural. But perhaps this is something to think about in our Next Forum™.
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i
Yeah, if there were 2-way support for something like RSS (so someone could make one of those channels from an RSS feed that they publish on their own site, or publish the content from one of these channels to their own site) that'd be a great way to encourage people to share their work here without feeling any lock-in.
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And yeah, I think this would work well with the zulip-style channels (or whatever they call them) where you could look at just one devlog channel on its own to see all of someone's work, or the parent grouping to see all updates from all devlog channels interleaved.
k
Right now I'm kinda thinking of the opposite of that. Aggregating things nudges people to follow them. A long flat list of feeds nudges people to ignore them. Like home workshops but with hyperlinks.
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(This thought inspired by Dynamicland.)
j
Oh, my home Discord also uses this style of 'lab notebook' channel. They aren't explicitly per-person, but our conversational norm is to not change topics in one channel too quickly. So in a channel that gets one post per week, as opposed to two posts per day, the effect is that it has an owner. Who sometimes changes. I feel compelled to argue in favor of this state of fluidity (i.e. no fixed owner) because, in part, I still haven't got Medium to click for me. Well, every Medium is its own newsletter, for a start. But Medium posts lack the equivalent of WordPress-style ping-backs. This would mean I can't notify someone I'm directly responding to without also sliding into their comments. Is that really the norm on Medium? Ultimately, I'm just not going to effort-post if it isn't an organic part of some conversation, even if it's a very slow and drawn-out conversation. Therefore, the critical piece here is not the forum's precise structure of aggregation. It is the pingback whenever someone either replies (inside of the thread), or loudly replies (in the aggregated feed, if applicable).
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k
I really like the idea of slow conversations. Which requires pingback but also good support for search. Cross-links between conversations are a plus as well.