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Wow that's pretty ambitious, and pretty relevant for me right now. I build models, and so used to frequent forums to post to build threads detailing what I'd do
by Spearchucker 6y ago
Wow that's pretty ambitious, and pretty relevant for me right now. I build models, and so used to frequent forums to post to build threads detailing what I'd done with photos, sometimes a Word doc, video, and always some plain text.
Problem with the forums is that they're dated. It's easy enough to find old content because search is usually pretty ok. Who owns content is still not a solved thing though. A forum in Germany insists you upload your IP to their servers so that your photos don't disappear over time. Other forums let me host my hosts on my own web site with a link.
Facebook of course is godawful. Everybody is there, so everybody posts there. Unforunately you cannot find old stuff you know is there. Photos aren't annotated, comments aren't searcheable, stuff just disappears into a rabbit hole. Here today, gone tomorrow. Facebook's content is ephemeral, so it's groups are the worst possible forum replacement.
And from what I can tell (I can't start my own group to assess features) Mobilizon doesn't add anything to improve on what Facebook already does.
What's needed is an organic heirarchical taxonomy where you're persented with a top-level list of options. Say for instance manufacturers. You pick one, and are given a list of models. Pick one of those and you see all models in the repository for that make/model. Lastly (in my contrived example) you might choose your favourite model maker to further narrow that list, or a date, country or whatever.
This is not hard to build (modellers are pretty hardcore about what they build, and so would not hesitate to add the meta data needed to drive this), and I've been toying with a usable UI for it for some time. Maybe I should post up a proof of concept somewhere...
- jtbayly 6y agoThis use case seems orthogonal at best to the idea of Mobilizon.
- Spearchucker 6y agoArguably. Forums have been supplanted by Facebook groups. Mobilizon seeks to do the same to Facebook. I can't create a group so I cannot definitively say anything about it. You may very well be right.
- glenstein 6y agoYeah, I had the same reaction. Was that parent comment posted in the right thread? Mobilizon is about events and that comment seems to have nothing to do with the link.
- williamtwild 6y agoWhy not just start a blog?
- Spearchucker 6y agoBecause it's unweidly. Too verbose. A post is often no more than a sentence or less with a photo.Each comment on an entry would have to be another blog post with it's own attached/linked media. Also tag clouds lack structure. It's difficult to search across blogs (which would delinieate users). You could shoehorn it in, but the blog solution is nothing close to ideal.
- wizzwizz4 6y agohttps://write.as/ https://write.as/ makes blogs a little easier, and the IndieWeb easier still, but it's not quite good enough yet.
- aaronax 6y agoJust yesterday I was thinking about some sort of social network where every piece of content is required to link to at least one Wikidata item, OpenStreetMap node, etc. With the right tooling this would get you the "organic hierarchical taxonomy". I thought it would be an interesting way to make sure the conversations are actually ABOUT something. And it would hopefully encourage contributions to those sorts of open data projects.