I’ve been participating in and managing communities of various sizes and levels of public/private-ness since I was 16, and I’m 33 now. The common thread and all of the ones that were really great was a couple of people who put in time not just conversing with others, but knowing how to create context for conversations to happen.

The art of starting a conversation that your community can actually keep going seems to be a dwindling one on the web that is so heavily focused on people talking about what they are consuming, which there isn’t really that much to say about.

The web that I miss these days revolved around interests and things we made, not just the presence of a group of people but the context of why those people came together to begin with, even if they also talked about other things.

I don’t find the context that come up on Facebook or Twitter or most other places these days to be all that interesting or capable of very much depth. In a lot of ways those things punish depth and encourage us to move onto the next thing that keeps the wheels turning. The lack of depth and the lack of “quality context” is something I’ve really been feeling a lot lately.
On Sep 17, 2019, 12:08 AM -0400, Travis Briggs <audiodude@tilde.club>, wrote:
I read Darius's post, and I realized that it was like "What if you
wanted a little corner of the internet for all of your friends?"

In my case it's sadly more like "both of your friends".

But here's to cordiality and civility and maybe a little goofiness in
cyberspace on tilde together. And maybe some new friendships?

-Travis

On 9/16/19 4:58 PM, Paul Kruczynski wrote:
Have people read Darius’s thing about this?

https://runyourown.social


Yes! It's a hugely inspiring read. It almost made me spin up my own
Mastodon instance but... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Darius' Mastodon posts about making his own fork of the code and
running it are inspiring. I take it you're following those, too?


Tilde IRC
could fit the bill for us…


This seems to be a popular choice. Not another Slack, please. An RSS
aggregator of tilde activity (mentioned elsewhere, I believe)
would/will also help a community feel.

Email lists are nice, though, because they move a little slower. I
appreciate that when life/work/projects intrude.