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- Every time I tried to engage here my mixed confusion of how to find the people I want to listen to, and how to be heard (or know if you’d been heard) left me feeling like it was a party for those who knew the rules & invested time in them. I came because I believed in federation & community ownership; I left because the experience didn’t come close to the other place.
- But last night it struck me how that could be a feature not a bug. That this is a different place, & that’s the first thing.

- I found myself wondering how the new interface, form, functions and rules of this space demanded behaviour, like I wanted to be policed, so I could feel safe to speak freely. This paradox was a revelation.
- are more rules needed beyond the universal ‘don’t be an arse’ TOS & to listen if anyone complains? Is threading 500 char toots the uncoolest thing? Is it bad form to sit on an instance and not communicate as the others on your instance do? To be a coop member who doesn’t show for meetings?

- So that was the second thing, the naivety of not knowing is it’s own joy. To paraphrase Chris Locke in #Cluetrain, first learn to speak as a real person. (“Real person” pauses, then goes back and adds a hashtag to Cluetrain to help #TheMachine categorise and Index said person)
- and with this comes another joy in having a fraction of the followers or Greek Chorus sized timeline. It *doesn’t* matter (beyond the way everything matters). Not needing an audience empowers freer personal expression.

And so I do something I’ve never done, but which stands perhaps as bridge between blogging which I’ve long forgotten how to do, and the open conversation of Twitter.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote a thread there without having drafted all the replies in advance so I can number them and guarantee a decent ending. It seems a place to craft headlines, not stories — altho of course the best there can write a thread that beats almost any blog because it allows discussion of every statement.

But inherent in that great democratisation and innovation in communication comes - for me at least - a barrier to speaking freely. I’ve tried to blog three times this year (the first time in four years) and been struck that I’ve forgotten how, which I think comes down to micro-editing every expression, policing every verb.

We need to take care but we cannot censor ourselves for risk of a typo or mis-speak at this vital make or break moment for the planet. Speak freely until challenged, surely.

@nicol I've found having a digital garden / personal wiki has been good for me on this point - worrying a bit less about saying the right thing, and focusing more on just saying *something*, at least.

@neil how do you mean? As in a private wiki / garden you host privately? Or you use Mastadon as this?

@nicol It's a wiki / garden that I host publicly - https://commonplace.doubleloop.net . A place for learning / writing in public, where I can do so without worrying too much about correctness or coherence.

I use mastodon as a companion for it - a stream from which I take water for my garden.

@neil looks nice! Am always curious about better ways to track and archive good things found online. I used to feed faves from Google Reader into a wiki - sounds a little similar. Have been trying out Pocket - but curious about better ways to republish what I’m saving after it’s been tagged.

@nicol Absolutely, that's pretty much the idea, for me - a place to accumulate and grow ideas, and not have them disappear in the stream.

This is a good overview of the 'digital garden' idea - https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

@neil that’s a fascinating read, thank you. I love the ‘Chronological Sort Era" phrase!

So much gets lost in the stream.

And so much human (and fossil fuel) energy is lost on people doing projects or answering questions someone else has done but for lack of knowing about it. I can’t read this, via the fediverse, without wondering how these personal archivist projects can link up their taxonomies & metadata. Like a distributed DMOZ/ODP, of the pre-2.0 days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ)

@nicol Indeed so! Communal gardening is a very interesting prospect. One such project is https://anagora.org - cc @flancian @bmann @vera .

I have also thought a little about this from an IndieWeb perspective. https://doubleloop.net/2020/05/16/a-web-of-wikis/

Of course the traditional wiki is a fine example of a shared garden, but I personally tend to come at it from the P2P/distributed approach.

@neil. 'delete-and-redrafting' as I'm still getting to grips with this interface, and didn't mean to cc your ccs. Anagora's interface is further leap still!

Have enjoyed now gettting a bit lost in your garden… stumbling across Andy's Working Notes – marvelling at their UI, reading of "Dynamic Knowledge Repositories' which wounds a good name for what I was grasping for.

@neil Also your comment "I see self-sovereign conversation preceding even group-sovereign conversation" which reminds me of one of my dad's idioms "everyone wants a dialogue, but most people can't even have a monologue".

I'm curious if/how doubleloop syncs with your contributions here: https://anagora.org/@neil – does everything feed from the same gitlab repo? Also, as your WordPress is your 'stream' presumably you've not seen merit in having a garden in a CMS, but rather as static files?