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Hey, I'm currently in the bumming-around-Berkeley part of your journey! One of the reasons I found the Community Memory chapter of Hackers so inspiring (apart

Hey, I'm currently in the bumming-around-Berkeley part of your journey! One of the reasons I found the Community Memory chapter of Hackers so inspiring (apart from the Berkeley connection) was because it described a piece of technology that brought local people together by design. Today, we can go online and find out what people are saying in any part of the world on any conceivable topic. But barring a few notable exceptions like Nextdoor, there seems to be relatively little focus on technology that connects us with our neighbors and colleagues (except in a roundabout way). When I was a student at Cal, our Livejournal group hosted a biannual event called AnonCon, where hundreds of people would gather in a single thread and anonymously moan about finals, gossip about campus life, and discuss who they were crushing on. At the co-op where I was living at the time, this was a Big Event: people would huddle in the living room under blankets and have a merry old time reading threads and adding their own thoughts to the pile. You'd run into AnonCon participants in the real world who you'd have never thought were clued in to this sort of thing. It felt like the campus was suddenly electrified through the comments section of this simple blog post! We weren't really online, but part a quirky campus community brought together by way of technology. It makes me wonder if maybe these kinds of communities could be kickstarted with a modern take on Community Memory: a distributed database or forum combined with some sort of physical beacon that would facilitate peer-to-peer connections between local devices. There would be no pathway to the internet: if you wanted to know what was going on in your community, you'd have to go to a particular location (or find a friend) and grab the latest snapshot of the database directly. Perhaps someone might hide a beacon in their favorite café, seed it with some comp-sci talk, and then see who shows up to trade thoughts! Idealistic communities with unified aims and physical haunts could almost emerge out of the ether — in cafés, libraries, community centers and parks. If globally-hosted communities incentivize people to spread out, perhaps peer-to-peer communities could incentivize people to grow closer together. And maybe, the kind of unity and camaraderie evident in those oddball Hackers communities would subsequently follow.

westoncb 9y ago
Hey archagon—that sounds like a great idea. I can just imagine how it must have felt to get on AnonCon :) I wonder about the two principles involved there (or the ones I've happened to pick out anyway): locality + anonymity. Seems like the anonymity supports a kind of radical latitude of expression, which is great for the initial phases of starting something new; meanwhile, locality constrains who participates in the discussion and influences the topic (to things more local) without constraining it. Thinking about this more concretely, while I had trouble finding a group of like-minded thinkers/builders in Berkeley/Cambridge—I have no difficulty imagining that if I posted a number of random ideas I've had about programming languages or philosophy or whatever, that I would have received some interesting replies, and that some of those replies could turn into discussions, and some discussions would evolve into something no longer anonymous. As for implementation, I most readily see it as an AR application: message boards tied to physical locations. Of course there are any number of factors in how this would be carried out that would attract (or repel) different subsets of people, or different types of discussions etc. For instance, I could see it devolving into a world-wide cover of bathroom stall graffiti if too loose, or generating little of interest if too constrained, etc. Cool projects btw! I think we spoke briefly on here some years ago :) Also, did you ever go 'the Med' in Berkeley? Do you know if anything similar has taken its place since it shut down? Edit: actually, I guess the 'AR' aspect of it is pretty superficial—it's just the idea of associating virtual objects with geolocations that I had in mind with it. But, at least with the current state of AR frameworks/hardware, it would probably be better to just use a more traditional 2D UI for this. But the key thing would be that depending on where you were standing in the physical world, you'd get a different set of 'terminals' (or something), which you could jump into and start discussing things.
- westoncb 9y ago
  I drew up a wireframe of what I'm thinking: http://symbolflux.com/images/wireframe123.jpg http://symbolflux.com/images/wireframe123.jpg Would be cool to keep it something super simple like that—though you'd need a way to create new 'terminals' which get pinned to particular geolocations, too. (Also 'terminal' isn't quite the right concept/term... but yeah.) Maybe each user gets one terminal that they can place somewhere... Maybe if it gets enough upvotes the user who placed it is allowed to place another. Thoughts anyone?
  - archagon 9y ago
    I definitely agree with your thoughts on locality and anonymity! However, I'm also of the opinion that decentralization via offline device-to-device communication is a key component. 1) Barrier of entry. Having to invest in a hardware beacon to kickstart your community (as well as having to go to a physical location to access it) means that "hit and run" communities and users won’t be too much of a problem. You can see this working in communities like Metafilter and SomethingAwful which charge a nominal entry fee to keep low-effort users out. But notably, the beacon wouldn't be essential: once a community is formed and the peers all know about each other, they could connect directly without having to touch the beacon first. (For convenience, it might still be useful to keep around for the same reason people use Github.) 2) Persistence. Personally, I’m reluctant to seriously commit to any centralized social networks, and I think many others feel the same way. Startups rise and fall with the blink of an eye, and it’s disastrous when the community you’ve spent years cultivating suddenly vanishes due to corporate acquihires or pivots. If a community is based on peer-to-peer protocols, and if the data for that community is stored locally on each member's phones and computers, then the life of that community is completely decoupled from the whims of its creators and the fate of its tech stack. 3) Aligned incentives. Peer-to-peer communities are beholden to no organization other than themselves. They can determine their own fates. They have nothing to fear from shareholders or CEOs. Nobody can make them function differently without their consent. And vitally, by design, there can be no temptation to take the community online for convenience. Meeting up at a physical location is an inherent and inalterable part of the system. (Though of course, one peer could manually relay the state of the community to another peer through an online channel. But that wouldn't be the typical use case and would require manual work.) I admit that perhaps it's more of an emotional issue than a practical one. Even though sites like Nextdoor (or the same AnonCon) are tied to physical locations, all the data is still stored on some central service and could easily disappear tomorrow. Whereas a mesh-network-style community would in fact be an artifact of the real world, with all the pros and cons that this entails. Different behaviors — ones that I can't predict — would surely emerge from these differences in implementation. (But as a starting point, a central-server-based, geo-pinned community service would be really awesome, too! I'm just not sure it would be possible to deal with location spoofing.) I like your interface idea! I can imagine "terminals" appearing in the list much like Wi-Fi hotspots or Bluetooth devices. If they were indeed paired to physical devices, perhaps some central site could help keep track of them (à la Geocaching). I wonder if a Raspberry Pi could be seen and accessed by an iOS or Android device without an internet connection?

westoncb 9y ago

Hey archagon—that sounds like a great idea. I can just imagine how it must have felt to get on AnonCon :) I wonder about the two principles involved there (or the ones I've happened to pick out anyway): locality + anonymity. Seems like the anonymity supports a kind of radical latitude of expression, which is great for the initial phases of starting something new; meanwhile, locality constrains who participates in the discussion and influences the topic (to things more local) without constraining it. Thinking about this more concretely, while I had trouble finding a group of like-minded thinkers/builders in Berkeley/Cambridge—I have no difficulty imagining that if I posted a number of random ideas I've had about programming languages or philosophy or whatever, that I would have received some interesting replies, and that some of those replies could turn into discussions, and some discussions would evolve into something no longer anonymous. As for implementation, I most readily see it as an AR application: message boards tied to physical locations. Of course there are any number of factors in how this would be carried out that would attract (or repel) different subsets of people, or different types of discussions etc. For instance, I could see it devolving into a world-wide cover of bathroom stall graffiti if too loose, or generating little of interest if too constrained, etc. Cool projects btw! I think we spoke briefly on here some years ago :) Also, did you ever go 'the Med' in Berkeley? Do you know if anything similar has taken its place since it shut down? Edit: actually, I guess the 'AR' aspect of it is pretty superficial—it's just the idea of associating virtual objects with geolocations that I had in mind with it. But, at least with the current state of AR frameworks/hardware, it would probably be better to just use a more traditional 2D UI for this. But the key thing would be that depending on where you were standing in the physical world, you'd get a different set of 'terminals' (or something), which you could jump into and start discussing things.

westoncb 9y ago
I drew up a wireframe of what I'm thinking: http://symbolflux.com/images/wireframe123.jpg http://symbolflux.com/images/wireframe123.jpg Would be cool to keep it something super simple like that—though you'd need a way to create new 'terminals' which get pinned to particular geolocations, too. (Also 'terminal' isn't quite the right concept/term... but yeah.) Maybe each user gets one terminal that they can place somewhere... Maybe if it gets enough upvotes the user who placed it is allowed to place another. Thoughts anyone?
- archagon 9y ago
  I definitely agree with your thoughts on locality and anonymity! However, I'm also of the opinion that decentralization via offline device-to-device communication is a key component. 1) Barrier of entry. Having to invest in a hardware beacon to kickstart your community (as well as having to go to a physical location to access it) means that "hit and run" communities and users won’t be too much of a problem. You can see this working in communities like Metafilter and SomethingAwful which charge a nominal entry fee to keep low-effort users out. But notably, the beacon wouldn't be essential: once a community is formed and the peers all know about each other, they could connect directly without having to touch the beacon first. (For convenience, it might still be useful to keep around for the same reason people use Github.) 2) Persistence. Personally, I’m reluctant to seriously commit to any centralized social networks, and I think many others feel the same way. Startups rise and fall with the blink of an eye, and it’s disastrous when the community you’ve spent years cultivating suddenly vanishes due to corporate acquihires or pivots. If a community is based on peer-to-peer protocols, and if the data for that community is stored locally on each member's phones and computers, then the life of that community is completely decoupled from the whims of its creators and the fate of its tech stack. 3) Aligned incentives. Peer-to-peer communities are beholden to no organization other than themselves. They can determine their own fates. They have nothing to fear from shareholders or CEOs. Nobody can make them function differently without their consent. And vitally, by design, there can be no temptation to take the community online for convenience. Meeting up at a physical location is an inherent and inalterable part of the system. (Though of course, one peer could manually relay the state of the community to another peer through an online channel. But that wouldn't be the typical use case and would require manual work.) I admit that perhaps it's more of an emotional issue than a practical one. Even though sites like Nextdoor (or the same AnonCon) are tied to physical locations, all the data is still stored on some central service and could easily disappear tomorrow. Whereas a mesh-network-style community would in fact be an artifact of the real world, with all the pros and cons that this entails. Different behaviors — ones that I can't predict — would surely emerge from these differences in implementation. (But as a starting point, a central-server-based, geo-pinned community service would be really awesome, too! I'm just not sure it would be possible to deal with location spoofing.) I like your interface idea! I can imagine "terminals" appearing in the list much like Wi-Fi hotspots or Bluetooth devices. If they were indeed paired to physical devices, perhaps some central site could help keep track of them (à la Geocaching). I wonder if a Raspberry Pi could be seen and accessed by an iOS or Android device without an internet connection?