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Discussion on: Project Benatar: Fending Off Data Black Holes

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

We hope that if a lot of folks stand up their own communities similar to DEV

So like Mastodon meets StackOverflow?

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern • Edited

That's a good way of putting it.

It's definitely Mastodon meets something. Another lines of thinking is a decentralized Reddit where DEV is like /r/programming and /r/javascript is also a thing but so is /r/nba and /r/torontoraptors etc.

All of which could be stood up independently by entrepreneurs or general community builders and their place within a broader mesh would come down to shared ideas about community moderation principles etc. Of course, as everyone knows, effective and inclusive moderation is core to our whole project and we'll always want to be leaders in this aspect.

The key is that incentives are aligned, and the value creation goes as far as possible. It's part of the magic of open source and we're just trying to build cool things.

There are also use cases for private networks (e.g. company intranets) as well as a possible replacement for hulking Slack communities etc.

Project Benatar sort of sets this up because the connective tissue between the programming community and the basketball community is your website. How profiles are shared across spaces etc. is something we'll figure out.

Our project has always been super longterm-oriented, but as we expect to release some of the pieces within this year, the shape of the whole idea could start becoming clearer.

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

What's the differentiator between the DEViverse and Mastodon in that case? A push toward universal, open protocols of communication between social networking sites? Or do you see DEV as expanding beyond social networking and blogging?

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

We're not necessarily trying to define what we do in terms of how it differentiates with other approaches, but we feel like our efforts of consistently scratching our own itches in terms of building inclusive community and making the content on the platform have initial impact as well as lasting values are things we hope others can replicate with the tooling we've built.

I think Mastodon took a more bottom-up approach where the ecosystem was designed to be federated from day one and the choices were always centered around that goal. I think this leads to different UX choices and userbase relationships along the way. Who knows, the ideas could converge, but for now we're happy to be plugging forward with solving our problems as they arise and hopefully create a situation where the software we built is as open and re-useable as possible.

There was another thread comparing and contrasting DEV with HashNode and I think the comments were right to ultimately conclude that DEV didn't really differentiate strongly for the better strictly in terms of platform but we've always had good ideas in terms of community building. As community building helps us ultimately create better software we create a positive reinforcement loop for the better.

Or do you see DEV as expanding beyond social networking and blogging?

The answer is probably yes in that I'm not necessarily trying to draw lines of where this project goes, but I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. Could you expand?

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

I think I was thinking of along a more narrow "product differentiation"-type vein, whereas you might have a more grandiose vision. This comment...

Love the POSSE adherence.

To me, federation is key (and the reason email is so popular). Is there such a thing for spreading content semi-automatically?

I'd expect either HTML or Markdown as a basis, and wonder how that would play with embeds and custom tags.

...might better outline what you're thinking? DEV wouldn't be just a social media site, but rather sort of a standardised mode of communication? Or maybe I'm extremely confused and should just wait for the press release 😂

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waynejwerner profile image
Wayne Werner

Though probably more like SO blogs or something, since SO is for questions and answers, rather than discussion. This platform (like Medium) is definitely more for discussion.

I do love the premise here, though. It's actually one of the reasons that I've started to try and excise myself from the gravity well of many of these huge systems.

If you look at when the web was young, and Google embraced and supported things like RSS and other open protocols. They've tried many times to kill off and destroy those parts of the open web, to say nothing of Facebook (and how incredibly ironic is it that they've introduced their own cryptocurrency? The only more bizarre organization I could think of issuing crypto would be the US treasury).

I've been working to get back to open protocols like email and RSS/Atom, among others. Storing, rather than streaming.

The other thing about these massive bodies is that they have a commercial necessity to bring you back in, so notifications become a huge part of people's lives. I noticed that I was living in a notification-heavy world, so I started dismantling my notifications, keeping them only for the actually important things.

My life feels a lot more calm, and I've created content more often, by quite a bit.

I do like the idea of federation, like Secure Scuttlebutt, or Mastodon, but so far what I've seen about federation is that there's still some lack of control, as well as in some cases a lack of... I don't know what you'd call it, but basically - we have multiple devices usually, and we need better tools to be able to bring our content(s) with us. Without necessarily having to depend on a commercial service, aside from the availability of TCP/IP, or the Internet.

I don't have those answers yet, though :P