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I like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro" communities. https://micro.mu https://micro.mu. We limit groups to 20 people. I think that's an ideal num

by asim 3y ago

I like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro" communities. https://micro.mu https://micro.mu. We limit groups to 20 people. I think that's an ideal number for real connections. Need more, it's likely for a different type of communication.

elektor 3y ago
Very cool! Thanks for sharing. What’s the benefit of your service over a Signal group chat?
- asim 3y ago
  It's not meant as a replacement to signal or WhatsApp but more a compliment for the "community" aspects which often just get lumped into a group. Community discussions usually breakdown by topic and so that's how micro chat is organised.
stavros 3y ago
Trying to use this, I get an error when entering a group. Seems like a cool idea, but it needs to have a lot more functionality to draw me in, I think.
- asim 3y ago
  Yea sorry, there's some very random breakages happening right now. Working on it. Thanks for the feedback.
bioxept 3y ago
How does this compare to a small discord server? What can it do better?
- asim 3y ago
  So it's private and invite only by default. There is no element of "public" and the focus is on real connections with people you know rather than people you've never met in person. There's also no notifications or "is typing". The goal is really not to try emulate existing chat or bombard you with the need for immediate replies. It's a lot more focused on how most of our lives and mine personally operates now which is with less reaction and more laid back. Group sizes are also capped at 20.
  - nathants 3y ago
    no is-typing notifications is a killer feature. sold.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
I think what ruins communities is large sustained growth and not size. Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days. What kills most mainstream social media is needing to show growth to investors. This turns them from a village with familiar faces into a train station where everyone is always passing through and there are no shared values or experiences.
- asim 3y ago
  That's good insight and similar to my own experiences. I spent time on various forums in the late 90s and early 00s. It was a golden experience and I got to know a lot of the members there. You had the usual suspects chatting amongst all the lurkers. The model was far superior to the type chat systems were using today to build similar communities. I did the VC funded thing and personally don't want to go back to it. I also don't really care about the high growth thing but being sustainable is important. Sustained growth and profitability at least means the thing can be around for a while. I also think it comes down to the values of the creators of any platform. At what point are they going to sell out and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is in the service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I think the only way to mitigate that is structure the project and team in a way to support it. So if you get on the VC hamster wheel, there's no path but hyper growth. If you go against it and say, run a really normal business or even a social enterprise (aka non profit), maybe it actually benefits the people it's in service of.
  - dasil003 3y ago
    > I also think it comes down to the values of the creators of any platform. At what point are they going to sell out and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is in the service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I think the only way to mitigate that is structure the project and team in a way to support it. This is the crux of why we can't have nice things, and I've been thinking a lot about it. There are so many dynamics that trend towards corporate consolidation and ultimately the alienating effects of modern technology. The money to be made combined with rapid global scalability and network lock-in effects, mean that it's an uphill fight the whole way. The bright spot is that so many technologists are disgusted with the direction tech has taken, and we have the know-how and agency to build alternatives. In order to address the selling out problem, I think we need to establish some standardized and well understood commitments to shepherding projects, products and companies that have some real teeth while not requiring a vow of poverty to maintain. The other key piece is finding the right hooks to get normals using these products and not just defaulting to the big tech alternatives due to friction. This is the hardest part by far, but I feel there is enough general frustration with big tech that will be possible to harness in some way. The key will be some kind of killer app that appeals to enough people to gain critical mass.
tech_ken 3y ago
This is a cool idea and a nice looking implementation. I have a Signal group chat that I've been trying to find a slightly better home for, one feature I think we desperately need is a community calendar; some way that we can create and coordinate big group events beyond just spinning off an invitee chat or something. I see that you call out event-focused groups here, is there any tooling that would support actually planning the events and seeing what's happening over a short time period?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- asim 3y ago
  Good eye. Yes we're thinking about that already. I think when we think about this tool from a community and even family or friends perspective, keeping track of everything you're doing or need to do becomes difficult even if you're living by the calendar. It's because that calendar isn't shared. So I think for us "events" is something we want to find a way to integrate at the core of the experience. That at to-dos, because mostly when you have some event, there's still some level of planning to get done before it.
  - tech_ken 3y ago
    Sweet! Yeah my partner and I have made a shift to keep our lives in our personal calendars which has been a huge QoL upgrade for us, but it's still so hard to keep track of who in the friend group is available when, as well as keep everyone remembering what's coming up in the next week or so. I feel like this was the biggest value+add of Facebook, but that particular product is now all but unusable :(. Adding shared, event-level to-do lists to a calendar tool would be absolutely KILLER, we just planned a big group camping trip and it was an enormous headache to track who was riding with who, who was bringing food, wood, etc. Having even just one or two simple tools to coordinate all that would have been a lifesaver. Definitely looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
    - asim 3y ago
vitehozonage 3y ago
What did you use to implement end-to-end encryption?
- asim 3y ago
  There's no end to end encryption right now but it's interesting the thought immediately goes there. This is not a replacement for signal, WhatsApp, etc. It's more like an advancement on forums or replacement for Facebook groups that takes things private in the sense that it's invite only and no one outside your group can talk to you. The recent community chats product from Facebook has also foregone end to end encryption because they want to be able to centralise the tech and moderation as it's much simpler for group products. Again this is not a replacement for whatsapp, signal or related messengers.
  - vitehozonage 3y ago
    Difficult to have "real connections" in a small, intimate group if you know you're being watched. Putting a 1984 telescreen in the room has a chilling effect. Without E2EE that's what you are building. Small, encrypted groups with people you know makes sense (like Signal). Large, unencrypted, open groups make sense (like reddit, facebook groups). I don't understand how you're trying to make something with parts of each, it doesnt make sense to me
    - asim 3y ago
      Do you believe slack messages are private? Or DMs on twitter? How about the content you store on Notion or Google docs. I guess what I'm saying is there's a lot of places where it doesn't matter as long as your data is stored securely and privately in a way that no one can access it and the operators are not mistreating it. At the end of the day we still need a way to ensure certain terrible content never exists on the platform which is illegal but we're also doing this because we're not happy with the state of corporate run systems at the moment. I think there's the potential for a "community interest" platform where we actually trust the people who run it and they're totally aligned in doing it for the public good. I'm still figuring out how to convey that message more broadly to people.
em-bee 3y ago
20 seems a bit low. what happens if i want to invite 21 people? many groups have a few active people and many less active people. one group i am in has about 80 members, 10-20 or which are active and keep a steady stream of communication. if the group were to grow much beyond that, it would be to much. so you are right that 20 active people is a good group size but if there is a technical limit of 20 that means i have to police all the inactive people in order to have room for active people. seems to create more overhead than i'd be comfortable with. wechat groups have a limit of 500 people. it's big enough to allow some flexibility for groups that have lots of members but little communication, but don't allow the groups to get so large as to get out of hand. the ideal technical limit for me is somewhere between 100 and 500. less than that and i'd run into to many corner cases because some group somewhere hit the limit. most of the groups i am active in have less than 100 members, but many have more than 20, but i am also in some groups that have more than 200 members, most of which are just reading and a few contributing.
- em-bee 3y ago
  what would be interesting is a feature where the moderators can limit the group size. start with 20, and if that limit is almost reached, have an option to raise it. by that time a moderator will have an idea if the group can handle more growth or not.
- ilyt 3y ago
  I think that's spot on. The other thing I noticed that in let's say "stable" communities (slow growth, many long term members) there is much more of self-policing going. If someone acts outside of the implicit or explicit rules there is bigger chance someone would respond to that in "hey, behave, we don't do that here" comment and 9/10 that's enough, no mod involvement is needed, no bans or other punishment needs to be applied. When community is a lot of "random people off the street" (no effort to create account or join, just start writing) that happens much more rarely
- asim 3y ago
  The 20 limit was really based on personal experience in the sense that those are 20 really high fidelity connections with people you know and interact with in a way that's more powerful than the network of 100 interrelated people. So if I have a close friend group of less than 20, in fact more like 12-15, I know that's going to be a tight knit group. Whereas if I open that up to 100, it might be more generically based around some interest like "tech dads" with passive conversation but mostly dominated by the vocal minority. Maybe there's a place for that but I'd be interested to learn and see the limits myself before opening it up. Or just charge for that 100 member group. I know in a community setting you have more passive members than not. I just don't know if I want to start out enabling that before having really solid admin and moderation tools.
Solvency 3y ago
The big bubbly space-inefficient chatroom UI you're using seems so irrelevant/obsolete here. It already makes me stressed out, thinking of dealing with an SMS group on my iPhone of 20 people. It'd be the worst possible user experience to engage with a meaningful community in a meaningful way over time.
- asim 3y ago
  Thanks, we're thinking about changing to a feed format but will take your comments into consideration.
manicdee 3y ago
Dunbar's number is 150, which seems about right for the number of people to be involved for the group to end up devolving into two macro communities. The micro-communities still hover round the 2 to 5 mark where everyone gets to feel like they're participating and appreciated.

by asim 3y ago

elektor 3y ago

Very cool! Thanks for sharing. What’s the benefit of your service over a Signal group chat?

asim 3y ago
It's not meant as a replacement to signal or WhatsApp but more a compliment for the "community" aspects which often just get lumped into a group. Community discussions usually breakdown by topic and so that's how micro chat is organised.

stavros 3y ago

Trying to use this, I get an error when entering a group. Seems like a cool idea, but it needs to have a lot more functionality to draw me in, I think.

asim 3y ago
Yea sorry, there's some very random breakages happening right now. Working on it. Thanks for the feedback.

bioxept 3y ago

How does this compare to a small discord server? What can it do better?

asim 3y ago
So it's private and invite only by default. There is no element of "public" and the focus is on real connections with people you know rather than people you've never met in person. There's also no notifications or "is typing". The goal is really not to try emulate existing chat or bombard you with the need for immediate replies. It's a lot more focused on how most of our lives and mine personally operates now which is with less reaction and more laid back. Group sizes are also capped at 20.
- nathants 3y ago
  no is-typing notifications is a killer feature. sold.

marginalia_nu 3y ago

I think what ruins communities is large sustained growth and not size. Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days. What kills most mainstream social media is needing to show growth to investors. This turns them from a village with familiar faces into a train station where everyone is always passing through and there are no shared values or experiences.

asim 3y ago
That's good insight and similar to my own experiences. I spent time on various forums in the late 90s and early 00s. It was a golden experience and I got to know a lot of the members there. You had the usual suspects chatting amongst all the lurkers. The model was far superior to the type chat systems were using today to build similar communities. I did the VC funded thing and personally don't want to go back to it. I also don't really care about the high growth thing but being sustainable is important. Sustained growth and profitability at least means the thing can be around for a while. I also think it comes down to the values of the creators of any platform. At what point are they going to sell out and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is in the service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I think the only way to mitigate that is structure the project and team in a way to support it. So if you get on the VC hamster wheel, there's no path but hyper growth. If you go against it and say, run a really normal business or even a social enterprise (aka non profit), maybe it actually benefits the people it's in service of.
- dasil003 3y ago
  > I also think it comes down to the values of the creators of any platform. At what point are they going to sell out and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is in the service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I think the only way to mitigate that is structure the project and team in a way to support it. This is the crux of why we can't have nice things, and I've been thinking a lot about it. There are so many dynamics that trend towards corporate consolidation and ultimately the alienating effects of modern technology. The money to be made combined with rapid global scalability and network lock-in effects, mean that it's an uphill fight the whole way. The bright spot is that so many technologists are disgusted with the direction tech has taken, and we have the know-how and agency to build alternatives. In order to address the selling out problem, I think we need to establish some standardized and well understood commitments to shepherding projects, products and companies that have some real teeth while not requiring a vow of poverty to maintain. The other key piece is finding the right hooks to get normals using these products and not just defaulting to the big tech alternatives due to friction. This is the hardest part by far, but I feel there is enough general frustration with big tech that will be possible to harness in some way. The key will be some kind of killer app that appeals to enough people to gain critical mass.

tech_ken 3y ago

This is a cool idea and a nice looking implementation. I have a Signal group chat that I've been trying to find a slightly better home for, one feature I think we desperately need is a community calendar; some way that we can create and coordinate big group events beyond just spinning off an invitee chat or something. I see that you call out event-focused groups here, is there any tooling that would support actually planning the events and seeing what's happening over a short time period?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
asim 3y ago
Good eye. Yes we're thinking about that already. I think when we think about this tool from a community and even family or friends perspective, keeping track of everything you're doing or need to do becomes difficult even if you're living by the calendar. It's because that calendar isn't shared. So I think for us "events" is something we want to find a way to integrate at the core of the experience. That at to-dos, because mostly when you have some event, there's still some level of planning to get done before it.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  Sweet! Yeah my partner and I have made a shift to keep our lives in our personal calendars which has been a huge QoL upgrade for us, but it's still so hard to keep track of who in the friend group is available when, as well as keep everyone remembering what's coming up in the next week or so. I feel like this was the biggest value+add of Facebook, but that particular product is now all but unusable :(. Adding shared, event-level to-do lists to a calendar tool would be absolutely KILLER, we just planned a big group camping trip and it was an enormous headache to track who was riding with who, who was bringing food, wood, etc. Having even just one or two simple tools to coordinate all that would have been a lifesaver. Definitely looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
  - asim 3y ago

vitehozonage 3y ago

What did you use to implement end-to-end encryption?

asim 3y ago
There's no end to end encryption right now but it's interesting the thought immediately goes there. This is not a replacement for signal, WhatsApp, etc. It's more like an advancement on forums or replacement for Facebook groups that takes things private in the sense that it's invite only and no one outside your group can talk to you. The recent community chats product from Facebook has also foregone end to end encryption because they want to be able to centralise the tech and moderation as it's much simpler for group products. Again this is not a replacement for whatsapp, signal or related messengers.
- vitehozonage 3y ago
  Difficult to have "real connections" in a small, intimate group if you know you're being watched. Putting a 1984 telescreen in the room has a chilling effect. Without E2EE that's what you are building. Small, encrypted groups with people you know makes sense (like Signal). Large, unencrypted, open groups make sense (like reddit, facebook groups). I don't understand how you're trying to make something with parts of each, it doesnt make sense to me
  - asim 3y ago
    Do you believe slack messages are private? Or DMs on twitter? How about the content you store on Notion or Google docs. I guess what I'm saying is there's a lot of places where it doesn't matter as long as your data is stored securely and privately in a way that no one can access it and the operators are not mistreating it. At the end of the day we still need a way to ensure certain terrible content never exists on the platform which is illegal but we're also doing this because we're not happy with the state of corporate run systems at the moment. I think there's the potential for a "community interest" platform where we actually trust the people who run it and they're totally aligned in doing it for the public good. I'm still figuring out how to convey that message more broadly to people.

em-bee 3y ago

20 seems a bit low. what happens if i want to invite 21 people? many groups have a few active people and many less active people. one group i am in has about 80 members, 10-20 or which are active and keep a steady stream of communication. if the group were to grow much beyond that, it would be to much. so you are right that 20 active people is a good group size but if there is a technical limit of 20 that means i have to police all the inactive people in order to have room for active people. seems to create more overhead than i'd be comfortable with. wechat groups have a limit of 500 people. it's big enough to allow some flexibility for groups that have lots of members but little communication, but don't allow the groups to get so large as to get out of hand. the ideal technical limit for me is somewhere between 100 and 500. less than that and i'd run into to many corner cases because some group somewhere hit the limit. most of the groups i am active in have less than 100 members, but many have more than 20, but i am also in some groups that have more than 200 members, most of which are just reading and a few contributing.

em-bee 3y ago
what would be interesting is a feature where the moderators can limit the group size. start with 20, and if that limit is almost reached, have an option to raise it. by that time a moderator will have an idea if the group can handle more growth or not.
ilyt 3y ago
I think that's spot on. The other thing I noticed that in let's say "stable" communities (slow growth, many long term members) there is much more of self-policing going. If someone acts outside of the implicit or explicit rules there is bigger chance someone would respond to that in "hey, behave, we don't do that here" comment and 9/10 that's enough, no mod involvement is needed, no bans or other punishment needs to be applied. When community is a lot of "random people off the street" (no effort to create account or join, just start writing) that happens much more rarely
asim 3y ago
The 20 limit was really based on personal experience in the sense that those are 20 really high fidelity connections with people you know and interact with in a way that's more powerful than the network of 100 interrelated people. So if I have a close friend group of less than 20, in fact more like 12-15, I know that's going to be a tight knit group. Whereas if I open that up to 100, it might be more generically based around some interest like "tech dads" with passive conversation but mostly dominated by the vocal minority. Maybe there's a place for that but I'd be interested to learn and see the limits myself before opening it up. Or just charge for that 100 member group. I know in a community setting you have more passive members than not. I just don't know if I want to start out enabling that before having really solid admin and moderation tools.

Solvency 3y ago

The big bubbly space-inefficient chatroom UI you're using seems so irrelevant/obsolete here. It already makes me stressed out, thinking of dealing with an SMS group on my iPhone of 20 people. It'd be the worst possible user experience to engage with a meaningful community in a meaningful way over time.

asim 3y ago
Thanks, we're thinking about changing to a feed format but will take your comments into consideration.

manicdee 3y ago

Dunbar's number is 150, which seems about right for the number of people to be involved for the group to end up devolving into two macro communities. The micro-communities still hover round the 2 to 5 mark where everyone gets to feel like they're participating and appreciated.