I'm starting to think a lot more about how I can contribute to holding space for folks who are caught adrift amongst the current apocalypse.
And, of course, my main passion is technology. Which is being eroded out from under me. Or at least that's how it feels.
But, as I gather connections with folks all over the fediverse and beyond, I have some hope.
A new connection of mine has shared some work he has done on distributed social networks, which I have had a lot of excitement around in the past. And it has given me a bit of inspiration to consider ways to build on top of similar ideas.
Sources of inspiration such as Secure Scuttlebutt and nostr I had encountered before. But I hadn't seen omg.lol or diskuto, which also provided useful and interesting sparks.
The big metaphor I'm working with right now is tapestry. I'm beginning to see my life as a collectively created tapestry woven by everyone I have interacted with in one way or another.
And, connecting that idea back to distributed social networking, many of these things start from the ground of an "activity log," which is really one long thread of messages. Of course, all the data you put into other systems are basically the same thing. Sometimes those threads are chopped up and put in lots of different places (like on Reddit). Other times it's just one big long series (like on Mastodon).
But you can have many Mastodon accounts, each its own thread. And you could create many nostr keypairs if you were so bold, each its own thread.
And the only person who can see how they all fit together, if you were to put your mind to it, is you. And even then, many of the services that you have put your threads into own that data wholesale.
Wouldn't it be interesting, though, if you could own all the threads that make up the tapestry of your life? Not only that, when you connect with others, and they also connect their threads with yours, what new interesting patterns could arise? If you could keep just the parts they have contributed to you, and they could keep the parts you contributed to them, wouldn't the picture be just a bit more complete?
What could you do with that picture?
Anyway, I'm considering this notion quite a lot. And, starting to consider what it would be like to have this concept of threads that you can own forever, and manipulate them however you want. And some kind of software that connects them together into a complete tapestry whose patterns you have the ability to own and influence much more than you can today.