What is a computer club?

a computer club is where a group of people hang out and do computer together
Doing computer is whatever you want...on computers, together.

the political economy of computing is awful. have you read palo alto? me neither. we should read it. we deserve better than the darpa-funded visions of xerox parc technologists

Rules

• Hang ou in real life
• reject corporate sponsorship
• computer club is a collective project

Guidelines

• computing is political
• the recurse center social rules foster collaboration and psychological safety
  be inspired by permaculture, small web, diy culture, computing as a medium through which better things are possible
• try to host computer club's stuff on your own computers in the place that you live
• be open to interdisciplinary computing
• be open to different histories and "skill levels" with computing

There is also a list of computer clubs and a list of tools

One of the comments noted the lack of algorithm on Mastodon which led me to a realisation that seems obvious in hindsight: no matter if you follow one person or a thousand, the algorithm-driven social media platforms will make sure there's always stuff in your timeline. Even if you follow no one, you're getting a full timeline.

Social media are noisy.

Alternative text:

Headline: Reaching people on the internet

Frame 1
Title: How it used to be:
Character Matt stands in front of modest building labeled "Matt's Website" with flags "Email", "Netvibes" (sp?), and "RSS" flags flying from roof. Matt says, "Come on over! I've got some neat stuff here." as a small group listens.

Frame 2
Title: What Happened:
Matt's modest building is now dwarfed by a giant skyscraper with Facebook logo on it. Sign above entrance says, "Welcome, new active users!" The small group of characters rushes over to Facebook while Matt says, "Actually, follow me over there. It'll be easier for us to reach each other."

Frame 3
Title: Where we're at now:
Matt stands outside Facebook building, alone. His modest building stands in background Sign above Facebook entrance says, "Door locks ENGAGED." as Matt yells at building, "Hey, I made some new stuff. Can you show it to my followers?"

Frame 4
Sign above Facebook entrance says, "PROMOTION! Boost this post for $10,000 and reach a fraction of your followers!" Matt looks at building and says, "Fuck."

(thanks https://kolektiva.social/@JohnMFlores/109383699767799787)

Un argumentaire en faveur des réseaux sociaux décentralisés.

It uses your content to pitch others on their platform, recommends other publications alongside yours, and pushes its users toward [something]. [...] Substack has now become a noun. When people say things like “subscribe to my Substack” [...], you can’t use the passive “just a hosting company” excuse.

!Instead of catching up, my feed reader behaves more like opening a book."

Here is Jeremy's feedback on RSS feed reader.

From Lucy Bellwood:

I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.

You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.

Because blogs are much quieter than social media, there’s also the ability to switch off that awareness that Someone Is Always Watching.

In the end, social media (Mastodon) best's algorithm is when the only algorithm at work in my feed reader— or on Mastodon—is good old-fashioned serendipity, when posts just happened to rhyme or resonate.

RSS is a way to avoid enshittification

While I do want to give users the reasonable functionality they want, my first priorities are to make the code usable and the platform financially sustainable. If that does not happen, any cool capabilities of the code are irrelevant, as the owners of Voat learned the hard way.

Users on Blue Dwarf become calmer the longer they remain because of the rules of the site.
Blue Dwarf is not valuable enough to be hacked because the attack surface is small and there are no value (i.e. no personal data).

Great insights :)

The constant scroll is associated with a worry state.

Social network site can be at the end only a distraction.

Oui, migrer en dehors du système propriétaire de Discord est une difficulté technique.

Comparativement à Freenode où les données sont standardisées et ouvertes, Discord garde tous fermés. Est-ce que j'ai loupé quelque chose pour migrer ou au minimum consulter les messages de Discord sur une autre plateforme?

Ce sera la même que pour Twitter.

The main point is why do we share so much stuff to websites no longer interested in the social web it was founded on.

Chat has its limits though. For information to be synthesized into knowledge, the rate of messaging needs to be slowed down to make room for less reactive, more deliberate, long-form expression.

That are Forums.

Discord today is equal parts group chat and forum.

with limitations:

• Discord is not web-readable and thus only minimally linkable
• Discord mixes different thread concepts (chat-channel threads vs forum-channel threads)
• Discord's finances are dubious
• Discord is closed source.

Messages are living information artifacts. As content blobs they can morph through many different forms, from ephemeral musings to everlasting tomes of shared understandings.

I like the flow from thought to chat to thread to article: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/583842/273896083-c035f6d7-47b2-43e4-abe6-4d42a5f54c76.png

So the author introduce the Commune app (see https://shpong.com/):

While in v0.x_pre-alpha it is essentially Linen (or Discourse Bot Kit), but for Matrix instead of Discord/Slack. Hook your existing Matrix instances up with Commune to give your channels web-public threading superpowers. [...] It's a Reddit-like site that operates a network of sub-communities.

Because the federation is disturbing for casual users, it seems normal to

remind ourselves of what social media used to be: a way to connect around shared interests, talk to friends, and discover new content. No grifts, no viral fame, no drama.

The barrier to be free on the web is highly correlated to the level of expertise.

You could loosely map some of them by how easy it is to get started if you have no technical knowledge. [...] The more independence a technology gives you, the higher its barrier for adoption.

Owning, control and independance on the web should be just as easy as signing up for a cellphone plan.