now that i've got a lot of the core parts of #tomo working, i have an open design question for you fellow amateur architects of social communities:
the #internet of the #90s was seen as a means for replacing regionalism with globalism. we gained a lot - mostly a high volume of people with shared interests, but i think we lost something vital in that transition.
the #bbs of the 80s and 90s was unique in that most were inherently geared to local use within a 5-20 km radius, often due to telco long distance fees. users already had locality in common by the time they began a conversation.
local user meetups were commonplace. people would spontaneously invite everyone in an area code to a "403 gathering" or a "667 meetup", have beer and coffee, and chat for the sake of chat.
i'd like to facilitate letting users weave their local social fabric into tomo's design, and i'd like some examples of how that has worked elsewhere.
have you ever seen an online community that had a unique way of creating a sense of locality for its users? what did you like about it?
@vga256 Hi there, don’t know if I’m your target audience. Just read an @arstechnica article about #bbs and was feeling nostalgic. I haven’t seen a modern era online community that could match the same feel of a bbs & #fidonet . Overall those were simpler times where you had to wait days/weeks to get a response to your post. Looking back I think it was the anticipation that helped bring the community together. There was no instant feedback
@dickrubin716 ahhh I hope it was either one of benj edwards' articles, or lee hutchinson's amazing article :D ars used to be a great place to read about bbsing
while there (likely) won't be a two-week wait to get a response from someone at another shard, since tomo relies upon the same store-and-forward technique that fidonet did, it could conceivably take some time :)
thanks for writing. i'm very encouraged to hear from another bbs user
@vga256 It was a Benj Edwards article! I haven’t thought of my Fido node in years (decades) but can remember it clearly! 1:2613/128.2. Ah, the days of using a QWK reader so I wouldn’t tie up the phone line.
@vga256 I don't know about "unique," but I've attended #NaNoWriMo "write ins" quite a few times and they're good. I think it helps that there's at least one dedicated community volunteer to organise things, and that they take place exclusively during the month-long writing challenge(s). Participants are also encouraged to join a region on the site even if they ultimately don't meet up in person.
@DamonWakes now that's interesting! i hadn't heard of this. i wasn't able to see it from the site after a brief skim - can you tell me if/how region choice influences what you see/how your interact?
@vga256 It's been a while since I took part, but I definitely get email updates unique to my region, written by the local organiser. I think there's also a local forum, though I may be getting that confused with Cap NaNoWriMo, which lets users form "cabins" (which aren't necessarily region-based).
@vga256
In the UK CiX and other BBSes like Monochrome had local groups that grew into meets. CiX is still around but I think Facebook ate practically everything like that.
@vga256 There was a dial-up BBS in Santa Barbara (“Bowhead Whale” as I recall) that had occasional pizza-Qs (instead of BBQs). I haven’t seen anything like that since. NextDoor seems perhaps closest these days, but not very much IRL there.
@vga256 It feels like interface customization plays a huge part in forming online communities with their own cultures; Examples I can think of would be the CSS modding of old reddit, or server mods/custom web motds for game servers?
That kind of stuff helps it feel like a second "home" of sorts with its own personality, I wager. There kind of was a similar thing with BBSes and their homebrew/customized server software, asciiart motds, etc
@vga256 for actual physical locality, closest I can think of would be the local communities formed over location-based games like pokemon go; It's still kinda focused on the game itself instead of the physical place, though..
@Difegue i hadn't thought of Go myself - that's a good example. i've very much considered adding a geo-coordinates option to #tomo which basically says "the server is in this approximate area of earth", and letting users decide if that's a valuable thing.
(whether or not the server actually is physically in that area is besides the point)
@Difegue y'know, that's a great point. one of my goals with tomo has been making it extremely customizable, both from a UI/visual perspective, and in terms of enabling/disabling core functions. i was one of those kids who really, really enjoyed making their own bbs ansi menus :)
@vga256 I remember seeing a bit of the meatspace gathering stuff on early-days twitter with tweetups, but that seemed to fizzle as the site grew. I know of some local message board things, like https://www.eastdulwichforum.co.uk for one small part of south London, but that always seems more functional than meeting-uppy. All of Orkney seems to run on facebook groups, and as a non-facebook person it sounds to me like that alternates between functional and pure drama. Dunno…
@vga256@billgoats Worst ones are small town FB groups - you have a public one that becomes a cesspool and other people make a private one to get out of the cesspool.
Conversations like:
“Please don’t blast your car stereo at 7:00Am”
“You shud be up by then loser. Lolllololkl”
@vga256@DeltaWye A huge amount of that comes down to the human efforts of moderators being dedicated, and treading the ridiculously thin line between being welcoming and friendly to people who want to participate, while being absolutely ruthless at culling the drama llamas as soon as they rear their heads.
I wonder if there's a way to get the tech to help encourage and make that side of things easy?
@billgoats that part is something i'm trying to focus heavily upon with moderation tools. i've noticed that thread locking on reddit is really helpful for putting out fires before they burn out of control.
that being said, moderation is miserable, thankless, unpaid, labour. hopefully there are architectural choices that can reduce its need. one of the most helpful things i implemented was letting users delete their own messages and bow out of a fight. it seems like the simplest thing, but self-moderation is often the most effective tool imho.
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