Still a good idea:
Let's grow online greenspace for healthy sociality & mutual aid
Mar 21, 2020
tl;dr Now that so many are forced to use online media to communicate, let's use this opportunity to create many smaller virtual communities and social networks outside the enclosed world of Facebook.
#socialmedia #onlinecommunity
https://www.patreon.com/posts/lets-grow-online-35091994
I keep thinking about how Google+ got the whole thing right with the circles. I’d really like some open protocol version of that.
@thinkyparts.bsky.social @hrheingold I feel like diaspora* is a fairly good approximation of this, especially as some of the g+ designers listed it as an inspiration. It was also, to my knowledge, the first distributed social network, in the sense that anyone can open a pod and interact with the rest of the network.
@hrheingold This is a wonderful take, Howard, thank you! I tried very hard to make something like you describe online--a virtual world with body language and other forms of communication (see https://github.com/relm-us/relm and https://blog.relm.us/social-universe-in-a-browser/). It is now completely open source. Nothing would make me happier than to see it be used by small communities to do good in the world.