Re: Small net and social networks

m15o wrote a great post about how the smolnet is a sort of social media.

This actually ties in with the discussion of definitions of distributed, federated, and decentralised. The system described is definitely decentralised, although parts of it are in practice federated (smol.pub, flounders.online, and tildes for example).

Anyways, let's leave the definitions behind.

Since leaving facebook I've reflected on this as well. This ecosystem is what powers the IndieWeb, and what OStatus started out as. I would argue that at least the latter is trying to solve problems that don't really exist (we don't need push notifications of mentions or comment threads for posts).

I totally agree with how the things we write here are part of a social network, even though we don't normally call it that. m15o also mentions that webrings work as groups, and I'd like to add that aggregators can also act as groups or communities. The different streets in Nightfall City are great examples of that.

Another part of this decentralised social network is twtxt, although it's not commonly used. If you're into short status updates I'd say it's pretty great.

Links

My previous post on definitions.

gardenappl's post that started that discussion.

The IndieWeb.

OStatus.

Twtxt.

-- CC0 ew0k, 2021-12-29