What Does Your Community NEED? Building the Purpose, then the Platform

Conveners: Johanna B (@johannab@cosocial.ca, https://profile.stone-soup.ca/johannab) & Anthony Zone (@ozoned@btfree.social)

Notes

• Johanna has been around the block a bit when it comes to the Social Web :) (and apparently still cannot keep Qiqo working …)

• Lots of online endeavors go off the rails because we’re technical people that we think we have a need for but then find people to fit into the product.

• Modeling their user… purpose first then design software etc. to meet that. Start out the Output as the north star

• Current model: building a product and then finding the community to fit the product, rather than building to fit the needs of a community

• Getting technical people into communities to understand needs, document findings

• The end is almost never the same thing you started out with… evolution

• How do we bridge the gap.

• Scott: asked Mastodon users what they wanted: young users wanted social networks - to be able to talk to their friends. Create smaller more nuanced conversations. Hearing that folks are hacking instagram to create their spaces.

• Ben: we should be asking not only what current users want but also others outside OSW want. We might want to go out and find communities and learn about them.

• Ben: People want to interact with their friends, find comment section under a random article

• Philipp: What actually is a community? Local/home timeline? Federated? Something else? His research data from Mastodon shows that users are confused/concerend about needing to choose exactly ONE home server which then is their community

• People build a community but then only reach out to those people who are only into the weird little community (cite?)

• Johanna: everything she’s done that’s successful about an online community is that there was a community first. Gather your people around their interest and topic. Forum stuck around until the overall system went away! Community first then build the online community.

  • Where are my people? « The curse of Facebook and LinkedIn (Algo takes over)

  • Member of a community then build the online system

  • Examples:

    • Ralvery < closed website but successful because the community has adopted it « ~10 million knowledge experts bc the community is there first

    • Newsmast

      • Does apps for federated apps like this.

    • QLUB.social

      • Qlub for schools

        • They have a dedicated app

        • Deploy an instance for the school and then federate selectively

      • Qlub basically partnered with Newsmast to re-package their media-oriented model and white-box app for French Canadian community endeavours, then created the school pilot Qlub.ecole.

    • Currently a community steward for two Mastodon instances. One project that works with public libraries as entry to Fediverse. cosocial.ca - tech community co-op that offers consulting and services to member/partner agencies, + Alberta Libraries Assoc. as the client building out a Bookwyrm “archipelago”. joinbookwyrm.com (confirm?)

• Eliana asked about what people are seeing on Fediverse that is creating communities. An example from OMCast where one guy was able to start sharing his on videos on another platform.

  • One of the things that I think we need to realize is “the Fediverse” is not actually creating the communities, beyond perhaps gathering like the Fediforum or the platform projects. Communities create the Fediverse. How do we better offer options for them to get started or to stay active?

• Philipp: People are concerned by identity merging, not showing the same things to their work colleagues than their friends. This is a problem tech could solve.

• Kirsten: people won’t say “I want to connect accross different social networks” what’s the job they really want to get done, no matter the “era”: ex share images with some people and some not. We have an opportunity: big tech are not “getting the job done” anymore (aka enshittification)

• Gilles: building an app for local community of local musicians and bands. Asking what their needs are, what apps they are currently using. (Gilles, meet Ben, Ben - Gilles. ?)

• Last thought from Johanna: one thing really interesting to me is the idea of non-timeline-based communications, such as Emissary’s Atlas (putting the social posts on a map). Vernissage is working on organizing the communications by photo metadata, so you can “follow” by camerea.