Idea: [Lifts] Collaborative microblogging as a team factory

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#1

Mastodon has a stance that accounts should be personal. However, in my experience through several underground editorials, and also seeing people making fun media projects together, i can see how entertaining collaborative blogging/channel maintenance is for both makers and readers.

Currently, microblogging is the most dominant federated activity, but amount of quality content still feels not enough to make a serious pull to at least read fedi regularly for an ordinary person. At most, i share 3 fediposts a month with my irl friends, and it is mostly art or unusual offers that one can see only on fedi.

Commercial companies flooding the fedi timelines would be bad, but making it easier for teams of individuals to form and to do media together would be extremely nice. “If you want something to happen, make it easy”

My first idea for this was an app in which it is NOT possible to post alone, but which has a staging area so you can team up and brainstorm ad-hoc.

The accounts in this should be fragile and fleeting by design. 2 weeks without a post? destroy! 2 weeks a teammember does not do anything? Teammate marked as dormant. Less than 3 active members left? Destroy!

Naturally, the goal is to make it work with teammates logging in with existing accs on different masto/misskey/pleroma/lemmy servers, but it is not required for start. A bit of a play-mode relaxed server, let’s play an editorial.

A more ephemeral bootstrap version than an app would be to have it as hackathon-like month-long events.
It is marked as a lift because it takes almost nothing to participate in, but leaves a player with a fun experience and hopefully a working team,

Makes sense?

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#2

Perhaps it could be a bit like the old community accounts on livejournal and now dreamwidth.

People could make their own accounts but have multiple people submitting posts etc.

Livejournal wasn’t microblogging but the community and levels of group postings mastodon has reminds me of livejournal so perhaps there is inspiration to be found there

https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=19&q=Communities

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#3

Sure does. Thanks for posting. An interesting idea.

Right now doing similar shared editorials requires workarounds. Like Fediverse Party has a Friendica account and in the profile page you see the three people that can post from it. They shared the credentials for the account.

Recently the Hostea initiative started, that focuses on offering Gitea related services that can also be self-hosted. It is maintained by a group of volunteers in a transparent, non-hierarchical organization where the members are involved in forge federation projects, such as forgefriends and forgeflux (e.g. @realaravinth). Hostea started posting a ciinic using the same workaround of sharing credentials.

Yes, this is a nice CMS-like feature, not tied to Groups specifically (could be modeled as separate AP extension), where posts are e.g. in ‘Draft’ status making them only group-readable, until ‘Published’. The generalization could kind of a Review pipeline, or simple workflow definition.

This I do not understand fully, but such feature could be modeled as yet another independent extension.

So if you aren’t active enough you are thrown out of the Group, or the Group might even be auto-dissolved? Is that to motivate frequent activity? Does the content disappear when the Group is destroyed?

I like this too. Note that here we have as:Event on which this can be based, and may be compatible to events on e.g. Mobilizon. An as:Group can be involved with the event. It might be so that once the event is closed all related content becomes read-only. ‘Ephemeral’ is yet another separate feature, and I guess it means that content disappears / deleted.

Re:Groups. Note that various apps work on as:Group support in one form or another, and there has been > 2.5 years discussion on standardizing Groups behavior. But actually all different kinds of group flavours and optional group features are intermingled in the discussions.

In Social Coding Foundations chatroom I discussed with @mayel and dansup (who is working on Groups support in Pixelfed), and I feel that Groups and their additional features should be modeled separately. I.e. “Core groups” are very basic. Then add e.g. Moderation on top, or Ephemeral Groups, or what-have-you…

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#4

The group is auto-dissolved. The posts can be either destroyed or archived. Maybe you get a personal copy as a memento, styled as a gravestone.
Would be a strange feature for corporate or even organizational blogging, but this is designed first and foremost as a learning, playing and testing facility.

Timeframing is much less about frequency than it is about regularity. First weeks can have stricter timeframes. The editorial is explicitly required to establish routines and to keep up to them. It is also assumed that irregular content has negligible public imprint, deleting/moving to archives just makes it explicit.

Paradoxically, it is also in order to have a more lighthearted attitude to failures. I would like people to just return to the pool and try something else with new exp and maybe another team instead of getting stuck for months.

The exact rules can be tuned by admins, and it is a fun game on its own to see which settings and moderation policies provide the best results.
Maybe if an editorial is old and popular enough it can become both immortal and enshrined. :slight_smile:

#5

oh, i know. One can also ask them to write a post-mortem before starting new one and this can be a part of a public tombstone.

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#6

Codename: Gravely Feditorial

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