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All This Unmobilized Love

Jan 10, 2024, 4 min read

All This Unmobilized Love

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  • A step back: About 25 years into the social internet era, we’ve seen weirdly little experimentation with social forms at scale. Most of our emerging networks have been driven by the workability of technical forms: chat, forums, feeds, galleries, streaming video, two or three variations on comments, and increasingly powerful (and decreasingly transparent) recommendation engines. Even most of the emergent gestures in our interfaces are tweaks on tech-first features—@ symbols push Twitter to implement threading, hyperlinks eventually get automated into retweets, quote-tweets go on TikTok and become duets. “Swipe left to discard a person” is one of a handful of new gestures, and it’s ten years old. If this were only boring, we could ignore it. But by treating a handful of technical capabilities and conventions as the low-level building blocks of social tools, we’re leaving almost everything good about the human experience on the table. Where are the networks that deeply in their bones understand hospitality vs. performance, safe-to vs. safe-from, double-edged visibility, thresholds vs. hearths, gifts vs. barter, bystanders vs. safety-builders, even something as foundational as power differentials? I don’t think we have them, except piecemeal and by chance, or through the grace of socially gifted moderators and community leads who patch bad product design with their own EQ. (View Highlight)
  • The big promise of federated social tools is neither Mastodon (or Calckey or any of the other things I’ve seen yet) nor the single-server Bluesky beta—it’s new things built in new ways that use protocols like AT and ActivityPub to interact with the big world. A couple weeks back on Bluesky, I reposted a thread that nailed my own reasons for being interested in protocols and platforms: (View Highlight)

  • My interest & goals w atproto stem from the fact that our current online systems are preventing us from coordinating in human ways. I want to unbundle & recompose these systems so that people can build online spaces for people Spaces that are a joy to participate in, that feel safe & full of meaning. Spaces that inspire you, that can challenge you in the right ways Tech doesn’t solve people problems. But it does shape the tools that help us coordinate solving people problems. As a society, we have shitty tools (View Highlight)

title: “All This Unmobilized Love” author: “Erin Kissane” url: ”https://erinkissane.com/all-this-unmobilized-love” date: 2023-12-19 source: reader tags: media/articles

All This Unmobilized Love

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

  • A step back: About 25 years into the social internet era, we’ve seen weirdly little experimentation with social forms at scale. Most of our emerging networks have been driven by the workability of technical forms: chat, forums, feeds, galleries, streaming video, two or three variations on comments, and increasingly powerful (and decreasingly transparent) recommendation engines. Even most of the emergent gestures in our interfaces are tweaks on tech-first features—@ symbols push Twitter to implement threading, hyperlinks eventually get automated into retweets, quote-tweets go on TikTok and become duets. “Swipe left to discard a person” is one of a handful of new gestures, and it’s ten years old. If this were only boring, we could ignore it. But by treating a handful of technical capabilities and conventions as the low-level building blocks of social tools, we’re leaving almost everything good about the human experience on the table. Where are the networks that deeply in their bones understand hospitality vs. performance, safe-to vs. safe-from, double-edged visibility, thresholds vs. hearths, gifts vs. barter, bystanders vs. safety-builders, even something as foundational as power differentials? I don’t think we have them, except piecemeal and by chance, or through the grace of socially gifted moderators and community leads who patch bad product design with their own EQ. (View Highlight)
  • The big promise of federated social tools is neither Mastodon (or Calckey or any of the other things I’ve seen yet) nor the single-server Bluesky beta—it’s new things built in new ways that use protocols like AT and ActivityPub to interact with the big world. A couple weeks back on Bluesky, I reposted a thread that nailed my own reasons for being interested in protocols and platforms: (View Highlight)

  • My interest & goals w atproto stem from the fact that our current online systems are preventing us from coordinating in human ways. I want to unbundle & recompose these systems so that people can build online spaces for people Spaces that are a joy to participate in, that feel safe & full of meaning. Spaces that inspire you, that can challenge you in the right ways Tech doesn’t solve people problems. But it does shape the tools that help us coordinate solving people problems. As a society, we have shitty tools (View Highlight)

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