@knizer Sorry, missed this! So, this post was inspired by, on one side, a problem I see of unmet demand, and on the other, intriguing new projects, and a kind of tantalizingly narrow gap between them.
To get more specific, right now I'm laser focused on how to get the activist left less attached to X. It's one thing to try to narrow the gap on stuff people still use as excuses to stay there - breadth and speed of information, mostly. (1/7)
But it's not persuasive enough to say "last time you tried Mastodon, it was much worse on xyz, now it's almost 80% as good as X!" And as lamentable as it is, people still there already know Musk is a fascist, so that's not gonna move them either.
What we do have is a still mostly untapped superpower: an open API that anyone can build on, and make things that meet needs of particular communities - like activists. (2/7)
One example is events. Right now, Instagram seems to be the primary way people hear about local rallies. It sucks for that! But the alternatives I see are even worse.
At Fediforum I learned about #Gancio, and it seems like a much better solution, so I decided to try making a Boston instance. Alas, I know nothing about hosting, so I'm slowly trying to figure it out in my spare time. (Actually, maybe this is something toot.boston could take on??) (3/7)
@misc mmm, i have toot.boston on a managed hosting platform, I'm no server admin, but Gancio does look very interesting as a project.
I immediately thought of upcoming.org, Andy Baio's resurrected events site, which is a well polished project - but its not currently fedi-friendly, given the intrinsic twitter authentication.
Hmm. Spouse was just talking with me about how I used to do the #bostonWeekend tag as a community builder here (and has helped me find a bunch of cool bostony-people), but hell, that was a dedicated 1-2 hours of work compiling events each week and I lost momentum.
@knizer Yeah, I feel that. I think one of the most important things is coordination of efforts. It's not realistic for any person to carry a project alone indefinitely. (he says, hypocritically)
Another pain point I've found through my work with @ifnotnowboston is covering actions live. The tools suck. I think we've done a pretty good job live tweeting actions and streaming to Instagram, given the limitations of our setup. But I quickly realized that in order to have any hope of cross posting to Masto and Bluesky, I'd have to dramatically streamline the process.Of course, a simpler process is better, not just because it enables including other platforms. (4/7)
But also: as a non-coder, my process improvement ability is highly limited - if I could code, I could imagine live action social media toolkits that provide a better experience, on both ends (creator and audience), off of X and Instagram. (5/7)
All of the above is about the unmet demand I mentioned, but I said there are two sides. The immediate inspiration for the first post was PodcastAP, which is very early right now but seems like it could turn into something very compelling. And Newsmast - again, haven't found it super useful yet, but I love the idea and the spirit there. (6/7)
tl;dr There is so much unmet need in just the one community I'm focused on right now, local activism (and pro-Palestinian advocacy in particular). And even without VC cash, there is clearly a lot of talent and creativity on the developer side. (Something X can never match because of how locked down it is.) Close the gap and we'll be cooking with gas. (7/7)
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