Holding space for each other

When we read together, we are in a room together, but we can't see each other. Twenty people could come and go; or two hundred, but two might linger. That would be enough.

Tessa's wonderful post from Tuesday has sparked words to go with the joygrief that I often feel after a round of Discourse. There is great joy in the eternal salon that is a room full of voracious readers. Yet there is also a deep grief, for all the usual reasons of context collapse, bad-faith takes, and whatnot. These cruel incentives feed into each other, like we are crabs in a bucket.

And yet I keep coming back. I want to live with a social Web that doesn't suck to be human on . So I must believe that another Web is possible.

But where do we go from here? This is why I jumped from academia into building. Because to build something different, we have to know where we are, but then we have to put things into practice.

Let me forward this idea: Every builder is advancing a critique of the hellscape we're currently in. Everyone who's building a community is pathbreaking Another Way that things could be.

Not for everyone all at once (that's Bluesky and you're on it, dear reader), but for small communities with local norms. Sometimes sociotechnical solutions look like people, but sometimes they look like interfaces, and taken together they look like infrastructure .

Small communities aren't just peoples' discords and substacks (yes that's little-d and little-s on purpose); but also places like the IndieWeb and all the community-led game wikis and even the diaspora from late, lamented Cohost . Not only are there other ways, but actually, we have always inhabited them. (Seriously, tell me you haven't used a game wiki.)

Erin Kissane's exemplary work studying the Fediverse makes me so, so excited to read her forthcoming series of interviews with builders on the ATmosphere.

Launching a Cloud Atlas

The right questions to arrive with—and the right structure for what comes out of the interviews—are not completely obvious. So I’ve been spending some time thinking about clouds.

This was a wonderful week on the ATmosphere, and I'm looking forward to writing about what comes next.

(Next up: "The network that reads together" - a deep dive into hypertext, the thing that I intended to write this week, describing aforementioned voracious reading practices through new work from human-computer interaction and ATScience folks.)