User:Tommi/Projects that May Or May not be Made
Fediverse Join Party
A Project that May Or May not be Made to involve people in the Fediverse.
What is it?
A party during which all the attendees make a pact vowing to uninstall any other social media app for <math display="inline">x</math> weeks, and to exclusively use the Fediverse during that time.
During the party, they will only exchange Fediverse contacts with each other, so that if they’ll have to go back to it if they want to stay in touch with the people they met.
Why make it?
- Because the Fediverse is fantastic
- Because the problem with Fediverse adoption is that people don’t get an “algorithmic” endorphine hit immediately after they joined. Therefore, they need some reason beyond
it’s the ethical social network
to keep getting back to it. - Because social media is getting more and more disconnected from the real world, and it would be nice to use the Fediverse just as a way to keep in touch with a group of friends you met in person.
- Because giving your Instagram handle is the de-facto standard social protocol to exchange contact information at non-formal events. Nevertheless, Instagram is not an independent tool nor a public space: it is a closed and for-profit platform, owned by a corporation. Integrating it in our daily lives corresponds to giving up on being monitored by surveillance capitalism (I am not blaming who is still on Instagram, just observing that if you stay there you are necessarily making a trade-off).
Workflow
- Organise an event in a location that…
- …is not closely tied or directly involved with digital rights already
- …is not associated with serious/brainy/intellectual events or activities, but rather more on social/fun things
- The party needs a name that is not strictly related to the Fediverse, so that it does not make people sceptical or think it is not going to be a fun and light event.
- Make the event RSVP, and while booking their participation people are asked a few short questions about what they think about social media and their relationship with them.
- Host the event (see the timetable).
- Check-in with participants to ask how the experiment is going (via email? Via Fediverse? Potentially in a Fediverse group?).
Timetable
The beginning of the event is like a regular party: people join, the music is playing and there are some drinks.
Intervention
At some point during the first half of the party, there is an intervention: a ≤1 minute speech or video that introduces the challenge and its meaning to party attendees.
Explanation and onboarding
If people are curious and they want to learn more beyond merely accepting the challenge, they can go to an info point or to a particular location in the venue where they can find people who help them with Fediverse onboarding.
Previous practice
- Knitting Our Internet a workshop to introduce people to the meaning of decentralisation.
- Luring in the Fediverse any person I have known for at least five minutes
- Talking about the Fediverse all the time
Relation to a wider context
There are many interesting websites and resources introducing the Fediverse, but there are no in-person initiatives, that I know of.
Some of the most prominent Fediverse 101 websites:
- Fedi.Tips
- Join the fediverse!
Fediverse
on WikipediaFediverse
on Join the Fediverse wikiWhat is the Fediverse?
in Meta’s documentation 😱
Challenges
- How/When to effectively explain what the Fediverse is and how it works without killing the vibe of the party?
Notes from FediForum
The Art of Asking Your Friend to Join The Fediverse
While chatting with Hannah at the Mastodon booth at FOSDEM, I got an idea that brought together epiphanies and reflections I had in the past months, as I have started developing the feeling of wanting to go beyond Knitting Our Internet.
Inspired by George Perec’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise, my idea is to make an interactive flowchart of a pseudo-ironic journey while introducing the Fediverse to another person.
Why make it?
To invite a person to join the Fediverse, or even to just introduce them to the concept of decentralised social networks, is a common challenge of all decentralisation enthusiasts. As there is no standard
or universally effective way to carry out this information process, this challenge has become sort of a meme/inside joke in the Fediphiles.
Both to make irony of this and to actually map all the possible user journeys
of Fediverse onboarding, this project intends to be a diagram exploring all possible pathways to convince a clueless and potentially uninterested person to join the Fediverse.
Workflow
Before actually having a prototype of the flowchart, I need paths
/user journeys
to populate it. This could be done in multiple, non-mutually exclusive ways.
- Conduct semi-structured interviews
- Ask people to respond to an online form asking them to reply to questions about mainstream social media and decentralised alternatives.
- Document the outcomes of the Fediobsessed radio show.
Once there are information and multiple options, the flowchart can be improved and enriched by simply asking the interviewee to go through it live, and successively fill the gaps with choices that were missing but that would have fit the situation.
Prototype
The flowchart should be converted to a static, interactive website, where the diagram unfolds as the user clicks on multiple options
Relation to a wider context
- Fred’s website about AI
- Other Fediverse explanation/onboarding websites and practices
The Trip
When I was a kid, my godmother Marina, who was also my catechist, taught me that the deepest, truest way to read the Bible was to do it by reading the Jerusalem Bible, which contains margin references to other passages of the whole bible that somehow relate to the present one. She suggested me to read until there is a passage that speaks to me, then get to the closest reference, read it, and so on. If you do it well, you truly feel like God is talking to you
. Be it because of confirmation bias, or because I had a more vehement and unhinged way of processing emotions back then, I felt it. I realised that there was a message, tailored for me (and, unwillingly, by me), that was emerging out of a universal word, written millennia ago. It was magic, or, most simply, the most concrete validation of my Catholic faith.
The years went by, and my belief shifted wildly, as did my faith and my Catholic practice too. Nevertheless, one thing clearly stuck with me, and planted the seed of one of the strongest values guiding me. The connections, a.k.a. the Crossovers.
- Internet wandering and Internet Awesomeness
- Enthusiasm-driven emails
- Incontro con Marco Ponti al caffè saltando una lezione di chimica
- Distrarmi dagli studi di funzioni per Analisi I per scoprire la storia delle colonne sonore di musica classica che ascoltavo nel frattempo
- Web Wandering e Internet Awesomeness
What is it?
The Trip is the experience of surfing the Web and making a story out of it.
Rapid prototypes
Form: How did you get here?
It would be so cool to also add a form on my (possibly every) personal website, asking how did you get here?
, and map social graphs and relationships that lead to a specific person, to a specific corner of the Web.
People would be asked to reply by sharing step-by-step all the other pages and websites, as well as offline social interactions, that led to that specific page and that specific website.
Web Trip Companion
The Web Trip Companion is a browser extension that records your browsing and makes a story out of it. It is the software component of The Trip.
Notes from Manetta’s feedback
- Very specific questions to be asking to people? Interviews focused on some themes
- What is the reason to track social graphs?
- Contextualise the relationships that links signify.
- Playing with Reticulum and diving deeper into it to find a connection.
- Research log.