2017/together

Putting it all together was a session at IndieWeb Summit 2017.

Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/together
Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0Cv10b83RE
GitHub repo: https://github.com/cleverdevil/together

When: 2017-06-24 15:00

Participants

Notes

Create a combined, user friendly solution that brings together...
Publishing
Discovery
Can easily discover toooo much leads to fatigue
Consmption
news
photos
microblogs
Current issues to be solved:
- Ability to read and discover content
- Lacking organization, sorting, filtering algorithm
- No good client reader experience similar to Facebook
- Best solution seems to be an RSS feed reader, which is a long shot from Facebook
- Cost of entry is high
  - Setting up the solution
  - Hosting the solution
  - Documentation and use (?)

Looking at nextcloud newsreader. With an indieweb plugin you can send replies, likes etc.

The goal is to make an open alternative to facebook. See your feed of friends updates and photos and news feed. Normal people don't know what rss is but people now know what a "follow" is because of silos

A reader is the place to start.

What do we like in a reader?

Social Network feature of "Following"
- Recommendations of things or people you might like to follow
- Separate notion of "following" for non-people entities (brands, politicians, etc.)
- Not all aggregated together into a single timeline like Facebook, which buries your actual friend's content behind noise.
  - Keeping people who post once a week from getting buried by people who post by the minute
Discovery
- People you follow have interacted with something (e.g., an Arstechnica article)
- The more people you follow that interact with it, causes that article to bubble to the top
Filtering
- People don't always want to see other peoples likes.
- Mastodon like groups or Google+ like circles for posts
- Filter to only show photos = instagram, Filter only short text posts = twitter
Threading of mentions and comments
- Commenting
- Reddit and Hackernews still have valuable discussions. Why?
- Downvoting / reporting to remove bad content

What do we dislike in a reader?

Someone coming in and swooping and pooping in something that doesn't relate to them
Sponsored content in feeds
Inability to sort chronologically

MVP

A way to hit a follow button on a website and have it in a reader
Seperate view in "you might be interested in" content - do not interupt friends feed by default

Random Reader Ideas

Groups of people (friends, family, indiewebbers etc)
Last read point
Filters
Enable vibrant conversation

Action Items

cleverdevil: will create a GitHub project after IWS
all: join the GitHub project and start sharing ideas / mockups
cleverdevil: take a stab at writing a positioning paper