Thoughts on chat and social
(agk) Links – 2020 September
I like durable and maintainable friendships, protocols, and tools. Friendships get maintained when we fix a tool together. Some tools help maintain friendships.
How I chat, collaborate, and do social
- Break room at work; camraderie on the floor.
- Walk or do something together. Hike, swim, bonfire.
- Phone call. If cell, on a walk.
- Blogs with good comments. Can be a time-sink or trigger fear of missing out. RSS aggregation.
- Pubnix: chat, bulletin board, gopher logs, internet radio, and party-line calls on public-access unix server.
- Wikis for long-term writing projects, especially big ones like rewriting 200+ page training manuals.
- Email and US Postal Service mail.
- The rare video chat.
- Some SMS (if you’re patient). Private (end-to-end encrypted) pictures and notes with people I love, currently over Element/matrix and Conversations/XMPP.
Other than text chat, none of these ways of being social involve frequent notifications. Teamwork online is hard. I miss porch-sits and chart paper.
Good tech
- Bmore IWW matrix and email comms policy (note: Riot is the old name of the Element matrix app). The policy recognizes that email (asynchronous) is right for certain kinds of communication and encrypted matrix clients such as Element (synchronous) are right for other types of communication.
- Group chat is stressful (note: 20 minute read). Chat demands attention now; asynchronous communication gives you time to focus, think, and pace yourself. Chat should be used sparingly, by small groups, and for sprints. Most digital group communication/work should happen asynchronously. Examples of async comms: announcements and check-ins (eg. email, newsletter, bulletin board), polls, to-do lists, and documents (including wiki, ’zines, and peer-reviewed publications). None of that belongs on chat.
- Ethical design and small tech are ethical tech principles. Cory Doctorow’s writing on adversarial interoperability (especially using antitrust to promote interoperability) and Bunnie Huang’s What’s the value of hackable hardware, anyway? are good applied tech ethics. Adversarial interoperability is “when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them…. Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.” I like hackability, repairability, transferability, and interoperability.
Synchronous decentralized team comms
If you walk away, you miss out.
- Element app (search/submit issues) is an end-to-end encrypted slack-like mobile and desktop app for the decentralized, self-hostable, email-like matrix protocol (Debian matrix wiki page).
- Other good options for chat are XMPP, Briar (Android only, but works offline), and Delta Chat.
- Where.by and Jitsi Meet are good videoconferencing software.
- IRC remains a good choice, particularly when you provide a web gateway like KiwiIRC or The Lounge to lower the bar of entry (example). You can install bridges so people on IRC can chat with people on matrix or XMPP clients, and vice versa (example). IRC is cleartext. Encrypted chat is not always the way to go, particularly when the goal is public, mass, or popular communication.
Asynchronous decentralized team comms
Check and post at your leisure.
- Wikis are durable, crosslinked, searchable sets of documents: oddmuse/wiki.pl, ikiwiki, cowyo, and minisleep. My favorite wiki hosts are branchable and wikidot.
- Forums allow for public, searchable discussion. Websites present public information.
- Private team comunication tools are newer and more annoying than time-tested wikis, forums, mailing lists, and webpages. CryptPad replaces Google Drive and Dropbox with a decent zero-knowledge self-hostable system that allows team collaboration. Aether Pro is asynchronous, slack-like private internal forum for teams. Participate in your email client or a dedicated app, costs $10/month per group admin. It’s threaded and allows reddit-like subforums, moderation, and upvoting.
Chatting with Glue is a comic about, like, the linguistics of how we communicate ideas in chats and forums. It’s a cool romp through what’s possible. What do I think would make sociality, teaching, and work via email, chat, blogging, wikis, or social note-taking better?
- If face to face isn’t possible, at least offline-first. Mostly asynchronous. Device-agnostic. Multi-device portable.
- Link simple ideas (threading, wikilinks, zettelkasten). Both tree and leaf views of associations. Search to allow rediscovery.
- Editable to break up, iterate, and refactor ideas/ presentation. Deletable.
- Simple, secure, resource-light, modifiable (especially via dotfiles, commands, or plugins), well-documented tools with minimal or no dependencies that each do one thing (markdown highlighting, spellcheck, timer, reading time and difficulty, translation) and integrate well.
- Community-focused (on shared or federated servers, p2p/gossip, or IndieWeb) with choice of private or discoverable. Nomadic, so the community can outlive the server or its admin. If private, single sign-on with 2 factor authentication.
- If private, access-control (end to end encryption). Don’t leak metadata or log unnecessarily. Support disappearing messages and permanent message deletion.
- Face to face sometimes.
- Anonymous use possible.
- Free or very low cost.
If logging into something non-public, I don’t want to log in application-by-application. That’s distracting, and prevents multiple modes of communication – something trivially easy in-person. I want to log in community-by-community, with all social tools of the community available with a single (or two-factor) login. If doing stuff with x group today, I want our documents, async messaging, chat, and videoconference.
I want to stay in touch across new distances. I want our business to stay reasonably private, as it was before access points and fiber and data centers stood between us. I want us to be able to turn off the screen whenever we want and embrace the complexity it reduces.
Future and past offline-first (store-and-forward) comms
These don’t require internet or cell service:
- Briar, mentioned above, passes encrypted messages peer-to-peer via wifi/bluetooth or online via tor hidden services. It includes DM, private group chat, public forums, and microblogging. This video of a 2017 CCC talk is very cool. Thanks to RSS, you can recieve messages from XMPP, IRC, or matrix chats (using bots), email, or social media.
- Earthstar will be the next-generation peer-to-peer protocol from the scuttlebutt people. It’s designed to support private groups, end-to-end encryption, message editing and deletion, and offline-first wiki, chat, forum, and filesharing. Currently usable webapps built to experiment with earthstar: ephemeral roleplay chatroom (Twodays Crossing), presence messages (status), and guestbook (lobby). Unlike scuttlebutt, deleting messages is possible!
- Mycelium Mesh will be a low-cost, secure alternative to VHF/UHF packet radio. Other LoRa projects include a qwerty messenger, meshtastic, disaster.radio, and Jebel.
- The best choice for radio comms isn’t always 802.11 WLAN, bluetooth, LORA, or cellular. Sometimes it is a West African HF email network, data mules armed with syncthing, git-annex, or pigeons, or a mobile SW station during the Salvadoran war (the story is told in the 1993 book Rebel Radio).
- Networks can mix wired and wireless, like amateur radio repeaters that bridge radio with echolink, or Havana's SNET and el paquete semanal (listings and video). Be creative.