Slowcore HQ

Word-Slinger-in-Chief + Senior Editor /slowcore-hq + /gift-economics | GenX eldergoth | dark ambient music nerd | contemplative animist 🏳‍🌈

Thanks you did parse correctly. Just re-read my poorly communicated question (I miss cast preview!) apologies. 

What is the best (or some of the best) place for the kind of ongoing convos you favour? I’m wondering if we could use it as inspiration to build a slowcore client (just a wondering at this point)

In response to Chris's question, here are some thoughts on creating slowcore-friendly spaces for long-form online discussions.

Call me a boomer, but for my purposes I still haven't found anything that measures up to the design of old-school phpBB forums. 

For ongoing, slow-paced, text-centric, long-form convos, and community-building centered around shared interests, I think they're excellent.

I don't have the tech chops to handle setup + maintenance alone, but I've been a co-founder of a well-loved and active phpBB forum before, with me handling the community migration/moderation duties and my colleague handling the back end.

Unfortunately that forum came to an unceremonious end for reasons beyond my control. But if some cypherpunks I trust were to say:

"We'll build you any kind of space you'd like for Studio Slowcore to migrate your group chat to a new home. We'll handle hosting and tech support, and we'll work closely with you for business continuity planning and minimizing the risks of single points of failure." 

Assuming we had sufficient revenues to sustain it, then I'd say "Great. Let's go with a phpBB forum."

See the first link for an example I found on the phpBB showcase page.

https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/

That being said, @adam- recently shared a GitHub page with some screenshots from Campfire (see the second link), and the design looks promising enough that @trigs.eth and I seriously considered it for our studio.

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In response to Chris's question, here are some thoughts on creating slowcore-friendly spaces for long-form online discussions.

Call me a boomer, but for my purposes I still haven't found anything that measures up to the design of old-school phpBB forums. 

For ongoing, slow-paced, text-centric, long-form convos, and community-building centered around shared interests, I think they're excellent.

I don't have the tech chops to handle setup + maintenance alone, but I've been a co-founder of a well-loved and active phpBB forum before, with me handling the community migration/moderation duties and my colleague handling the back end.

Unfortunately that forum came to an unceremonious end for reasons beyond my control. But if some cypherpunks I trust were to say:

"We'll build you any kind of space you'd like for Studio Slowcore to migrate your group chat to a new home. We'll handle hosting and tech support, and we'll work closely with you for business continuity planning and minimizing the risks of single points of failure." 

Assuming we had sufficient revenues to sustain it, then I'd say "Great. Let's go with a phpBB forum."

See the first link for an example I found on the phpBB showcase page.

https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/

That being said, @adam- recently shared a GitHub page with some screenshots from Campfire (see the second link), and the design looks promising enough that @trigs.eth and I seriously considered it for our studio.

https://github.com/antiwork/smallbets/blob/master/campfire-mods.md

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I never used the old forum/BB type structures much beyond lightly browsing woodworking forums.

I did spend 2 years working with a fairly large Reddit sub and can attest to the difficulty of capturing focus and cultivating conversations of prolonged interest, or even just finding a conversation from last week that kept plucking strings in the back of your brain. But what can I say, it was Reddit.

In the end, I think clarity and alignment is likely more important than platform (I suspect that’s why the BB format still exists in super niche communities). When something clicks, being able to push bits of that out to social media apps where the community members can engage with a broader audience (modified POSSE) seems like a positive use of the faster paced feeds. 

Not a bad idea to own the data as well.

Working architect, hobbyist builder, competent tinkerer. I want to build a house for sub $100/sf.

In my mind, ideally a slowcore-friendly space for these convos would be built on something like the FC protocol, Campfire, or Quilibrium, with the community owning its own data and having lots of options to customize according to its needs. I imagine that's what @chriscocreated is pondering, but he can clarify if I've missed anything.

However, considering our list of needs and constraints, unfortunately none of those options will be viable for Studio Slowcore in the near future. After talking at length with @adam- about Campfire and Quorum Messenger, @trigs.eth and I settled on Substack because it was the best match for us that's currently available for both publishing AND moving our group chat, all things considered. 

It's unlikely that Substack will be our forever solution. (Neither will Farcaster DCs, for that matter).

Even Obsidian, much as I love it, isn't going to work for publishing a blog in the ways I need. At least not in the near future. We had to go back to the drawing board after I realized that. That's why it's taking us much longer than I hoped to get these writings published. (Seems everything takes longer than you expect, even if you already know that and think you've accounted for it sufficiently in your business plan).

As for your two things to help retain contextual value (which I much appreciate):

For the first, I think it could be accomplished with Quotebacks (https://quotebacks.net/). They're used nicely in this post by Tom Critchlow, for example: https://tomcritchlow.com/2023/02/10/riffs/

Not sure how feasible that is technically, tho. I think Paragraph considered something like it back in 2023, but I haven't heard any updates from them.

Don't know how feasbile the second would be either (a feed of aggregated responses to the same link). But maybe @stevedylandev.eth would have some ideas on that.

In any case, there have been many, many token experiments for sustainably funding "network goods" (ongoing maintenance work that benefits the whole network like moderation, CLPs, etc.) but AFAIK no one has cracked that code yet.

I was a moderator, we had a token and multisig, and, in my own way, I did some backend dev work for the sub as well — that’s not my really my skill but I love to tinker. 

We also looked at moving to a more decentralized platform when Reddit changed its api policy but the inertia was too much. 

Reading through the comments under your post “The Farcaster Scenius Lexicon”. In the sub, we experimented with how the tokens were distributed to try and encourage CLP type behavior, but never landed on anything that broke through short term monetization.

When you say slow core client, do you ultimately mean, within a FC type ecosystem or outside of it?

Two things that have made a place in my head that I think could help social media apps retain more critical thinking and contextual value:
- Being able to highlight and extract specific sequence of reply/threads from conversations. Pull those out, rework them, repost them, but keep a link back to the original. 
- Providing a more contextual rather than social graph. Rather than a stream of 1 directional casts, where’s the feed that aggregates responses to the same link across posts and connects people and writing based on ideas.

Thanks for the thoughtful input! 

When you say you "worked with" a fairly large subreddit, do you mean that you were a moderator there? 

I think we're mostly on the same page about the importance of alignment over platform choice. Trigs has said something like "if the community seed is there, it will grow in any suitable medium." 

Perhaps, but nonetheless it's still difficult to migrate an established community to a new space. So it's not a decision I take lightly.

I can't help but wonder what we might be capable of if we had a space that facilitated (rather than hindered) the kind of convos we want to cultivate.