Note: If we had ‘comms profiles’ then this post is ‘stream of consciousness’-style overlay: Inventing terms as I brainstorm the input for a common, shared, i.e. Ubiquitous Language glossary doc.
Dream of social coding movement
Fedizens. We dream! 
We dream that one day, not far from here,
peopleverse shall arise on our fedi,
Standing firmly on its open social stack,
Built by people from across our circles,
To be united in their hunger for peace 
Let’s surf delicious social fabric!
Invest in shared social experience,
To live happier forever after.
Radiate 
Humanness
Spray 
Sparks of Joy
Enjoy 
Gems of Freedom
Weave 
Essence of Life
Just 
Walk your Dreams.
Reach of social experience design
What is the scope and audience of the SX field in the information technology landscape. Let’s look at the observations that led to foundation of the social coding movement:
- Free software vs. corporate / big tech where FOSS folks are ‘gratis employees’ of enterprises.
- Technosphere vs. sociosphere whereby app siloes are delivered, not integrated experiences.
- Dreams vs. reality of fediverse platforms aspiring to ‘reimagine social’ of future social media.
Point one indicates that the entire FOSS movement is a target audience when it comes to inclusive co-creation, to help avoid that bad actors can benefit the most from FOSS movement’s innovations.
Yet this is not enough to “reimagine social”. For that point 2) indicates that development of federated apps is too tech-focused, and the technosphere myopia anti-pattern is widespread. Here SX focuses on the missing social layer to bridge the gap between tech and people.
Then finally point 3) indicates that while dreams are big, in effect only existing functionality of the big corporate platforms have been federated, and sticking to post-facto interoperability with Mastodon ensures involution where it comes to foster real innovation.
This means for scope of the social coding movement:
- Co-creation: Involves the entire FOSS community, plus all fedizens → creator & client stakeholders.
State of social web and the ASAP fediverse
Working-in-commons vs. working-in-public
Social experience design and hedonic commons-based peer production go hand in hand. The commons co-creates the social experience, such that no matter its evolving complexity, it stays commons-based and sustainable at any time. They work based on known sustainability criteria and a sustainability-first approach that is in turn informed by FSDL best-practics applied by the participants operating in concerted effort.
The general objectives of a commons are:
- Foster attraction and cohesion.
- Foster potential and conversion.
- Foster collaboration and co-creation.
Healthy commons can:
- Offer protection, cope with threats.
- Handle sustainable growth.
- Foster vibrant culture in ‘calm waters’.
Some time ago we chatted on “comms profiles”, overlays that you might apply to a chatroom (the concept may scope to an entire platform) depending on social context, so that the functionality of the social experience can adapt accordingly and increase comms efficiency accordingly. Or rather in SX terms it helps increase the pure conceptual idea of “social bandwidth”.
The social context right now is that many of you were attracted by me, to listen what this SX is, based on I assume either pure interest or simply because they were already sitting in this room from the time I started thinking about major fedi challenges I encountered as tech evangelist and facilitator at SocialHub.
There is a “cure”. Nature provides ‘Free Brilliance’ to anyone should they have the Patience to listen to her beating 
Heart.
(Note: I am not Bret Victor, just highly inspired by him, and think it is crucial we heed his plea to mankind of “dare to use your imagination” as the only way out of the tarpit that humanity is stuck in.)
This “Cure” is no easy concept to convey, as it is entirely unorthodox to what we are used: everything is different, yet everything is natural and what we are doing already but not against a clear mental model of the unseen forces that are work: hedonic drivers that are in turn based on laws of nature and natural forces.
Social coding movement is a SX experiment in itself: turtles all the way down. We use the movement for our purposes and benefit, and as a result it “emerges”. Participation adds “food” to a fitness formula, energy was spent and potential value and synergy is waiting for other participants to proactively ‘jump on’ the Opportunity and ‘milk’ the Potential together to max extent.
Now here comes the problem: we live in a distraction economy that forms the perfect storm to take everything away from the commons over time. We move with full force in opposite direction because hypercapitalism unlearns us to collaborate, unless through a thick fog of technosphere and on the conditions of its owners. Hypercapitalism promotes and continuously advance the general idea that “technology means progress”.
Thing is: We like to speak about Orwell and Huxley. But did you ever do the mental exercise of imagining the social experience of being dragged slowly into such dystopic world? Guess what… I guess you haven’t. As I claim we are right there, right now.
Newspeak IS the Ubiquitous Language of Modern Society … almost!
And we ARE building Skynet while totally ignorant that we do. Not you and me: mankind. So what is the key tenet of the hypercapitalist social experience? It is Newspeak, as only that may lead us to forget all the time what we should do to solve wicked problems that are the wicked class’s status quo, and where they - the elites - hold the power and determination to prolong it. They are top predator of Human Nature. And they are winning. Because they control the fitness formula that sets the winning conditions. Hint: It runs in the cloud.
How insidious is newspeak? Well to give an example:
-
Free software / free culture movement think they are the shining light on how people should collaborate. And certainly we know the way. We forgot how to walk it. We think we know collaboration, but newspeak made us use the term to refer to the inability to unite and collaborate.
-
Our movement thinks it is liberating the world. But it is serving as milk cow for hypercapitalists who just smile and lick their lips when they grab our gratis low-hanging fruits. Software freedom increases our captivity. Don’t build skynet. Tech progress means regression.
Yet what we are currently doing is exactly that: Building Skynet™. “Why is that?”, I hear you ask, “we are all good value-aligned principled people” … thay may be, but in current approach there is no hope in hell that we can defend our innovations from any malicious actor whatsoever. Not until we truly work-in-commons.
Sustainability-first: FOSS → SOSS
In the vision of SX the open social stack of the future social web should avoid being built with FOSS. Instead at its foundational layers there should be SOSS initiatives that resiliently support is: Sustainable open social software / systems / services / solutions.
SOSS initiatives address the relevant aspects of their Free software development lifecycle.
A SOSS initiative is sustainable at any one time. It does not growth hack when it cannot handle the influx of people. SOSS does not increase scope of critical infrastructure projects if only volunteers do this work, and there isn’t a healthy community governance process. And importantly:
SOSS initiatives are aware of the ecosystem and technology foundations they depend on.
Some terminology definitions that relate to SOSS initiatives:
- Social networking: All direct and indirect human interactions between people.
- Social web: The full range of open technologies with which to build social networking solutions.
- Fediverse: The installed base of open and decentralized social web technologies.
- Fedizens: People navigating the fediverse in search of social interaction and participation.
- Open social stack: Fediverse technology foundation and commons-based ecosystem.
- Solution: Apps & services that are choreographed to fulfill fedizens evolving needs.
- Social experience: Solutions that are interwoven in the social fabric of the fediverse.
- Social experience design: Sustainability first solution design umbrella for DX, UX and UI.
- Social coding: Bringing technosphere in alignment to sociosphere, so that tech meets people.
- Peopleverse: Seamless alignment of humane harmonious technology to people’s daily lives.
- Human web: Web that can carry the load of a peopleverse and encompass all of mankind.
Use our imigination to overcome fedi involution
Hurray, since 2019 we had the open standard recommendations ready, we managed to copy twitter and add features to it.
Meanwhile we created a Fragmentiverse where individualism rules suppreme, based on a whack-a-mole driven hellscape of growing tech debt and protocol decay. Not even talking parasocial communicaiton patterns and culture warrior “we divide ourselves to be conquered” dynamics of ineffective activism, purely on the technical foundational level, the Fediverse is brimming with anti-patterns to be explored as part of SX practices and experimentation. Just to name a few:
- One Man Army anti-pattern. The pattern creeps in and takes hold gradually along the hobby-to-popular adoption transition of a project, and the relevant FSDL is not cared for and the project becomes ever more unsustainable as popularity and adoption grows.
- Golden Hammer anti-pattern. Using tools at inappropriate places. For example keep using an issue tracker for your non-techie collaborators, or for a broad standards track. Or keep using tools that work in the small, no longer work at scale.
- Technosphere Myopia anti-pattern. Paying sole attention to technical aspects and contributions. Referred to often as “techbro culture” where only coding counts, and the rest is looked down upon. This shuts out any perspective on what a healthy FSDL is for a FOSS project.
- Expectation Mismatch anti-pattern. Raise expectations continuously to those who came to rely on you or root for your efforts. Expectations you cannot keep, or didn’t want to make. Goes hand-in-hand with One Man Army anti-pattern.
- Show Unintroduced anti-pattern. Variation to “Show Don’t Tell”, which is a best-practice in the proper context. The anti-pattern “shows stuff” without attentiveness to ecosystem surrounding to clarify context, provide collab handholds. E.g. for open standards evolution.
- Contribution Payment anti-pattern. Where the own work is the “selfless gift”, a developer’s sacrifice. Contributions are expected, and seen as form of gratitude. Contributions may serve other purposes e.g. fostering cross-project collab, ecosystem interoperability, etc.
- Silo Universe anti-pattern. Where the own project is the center of the universe, and the ecosystem revolves around it. While the project in reality sits in an intricately interwoven environment. Like seeing earth as center to the universe makes all star movement irrational.
- Application Prison anti-pattern. Related to Silo Universe. The own project implements an application domain, and there is little connection to a business domain, where it is best to model interoperability patterns. Whack-a-mole Devolution results.
- Whack-a-Mole Devolution anti-pattern. The own app works and federates, is evolving. Local protocol decay and (third-party protocol deay) is tech debt to be payed off, while complexity of doing so is ever increasing against all the moving interoperability targets.
These are just some scribbled showerthoughts. There are a whole bunch more of these to describe and refine documentation and naming for as a SX practice to fill the pattern library of social coding movement, and formulate pattern languages (should participation lead the movement that direction… emergence should tell).
Weren’t we for Interoperability??
See RFC 9413 Maintaining Robust Protocols on the dangers of Protocol Decay.
Not going in-depth on this (many have been saying this for years), but I will just the 5 forces that drive interoperability (I tooted them before), 3 of them anti-patterns, and one an anti-pattern over time (post-facto interoperability means follow established players, like Mastodon or any app having first-mover advantage in a particular domain).
App-by-app whack-a-mole development isn’t Open Standards Based Interoperability !!
Looking at today’s ActivityPub-based Fediverse, there are 5 forces that influence its future and possible evolution or likely decline.
Ordered by influence these are:
- Post-facto interoperability
- Whack-a-mole adoption
- ‘My highway’ interop
- Savior-driven coding
- Open standards interoperability
Number 2 to 4 are anti-patterns resulting from shortcomings in the open standards combined with the inability to collaborate and improve them. Whack-a-mole development means keeping compatibility against every single app’s moving release targets, to keep support of their protocol flavours. My highway interop, means that any newcomer to a particular field gets to pick’n choose the domain model. If that app becomes popular then we move on to post-facto interop, regardless if the model was any good (usually it models an app domain, not a business domain). Savior-driven coding is “being pragmatic” and hack and slash around any protocol hole (mechanics of the protocol beyond msg formats + exchange patterns) in the open standard specs… to never properly inform ecosystem participants, and get things adopted.
Post-facto interop is: follow established players.
- Let’s hope there is more to the social web of the future.