Dan Knauss

Like a lot of us, New_ Public wants to reimagine social media. If you subscribe to their Substack, you may be asked a few simple but deep questions. I like this — if you take it seriously, it slows you down to engage through our oldest digital social network, email.

Here are the questions and my answers:

What is your favourite public space: Sidewalk Cafés or in the median, Montréal style. Also, public plazas and squares, like the way Churchill Square/City Hall Plaza in Edmonton were before the pandemic. 

Why it matters: These are neutral spaces where anyone can do anything, but they are also social spaces, so people expect to interact socially with strangers and friends. At least if they are healthy! When they become unhealthy, these spaces are fearful and policed. They can no longer function as the peoples’ place and be granted an unsupervised autonomy — they pass from zones of implicit trust to zones of suspicion. Any street or alley is subject to the same dynamics. 

Can aspects of this space be translated into digital spaces? Yes, it can be done in real-time digital communication spaces like Zoom and possibly chat groups, but the relative anonymity of chat always keeps you guessing. Videoconferencing with people speaking and seeming to be more physically present supports the same kind of tenuous social trust that strangers can develop in chance encounters in public spaces. If this is supported by the much more established asynchronous connector of letters, emails, and other “long form writing” over time, I believe this brings out the best in people, in terms of trust, deepening relationships, shared thinking, and creativity. 

What do you think?

A majority of people today might say blog comments or any type of commenting online is a terrible idea — the digital equivalent of a dive bar where there’s always a fight rather than your friendly neighbourhood sidewalk cafe.

But then again, many of us use forms of commenting and direct messaging for team communications and project management every day. They can have their drawbacks too, but open conflict is not a common complaint and would point to problems within a team or company culture.

Dave Winer thinks comments are almost universally a bad idea, and if you want to communicate with others online, you should do it with your own (federated?) blog. That’s pretty much how we discussed the topic on our respective blogs, X, and Mastodon accounts. 😊

I am more hopeful for well-tended digital commons. Public discourse online and in person works when an informal, unwritten etiquette is followed, but it has to be nurtured and protected. The more open and public the forum is, the more important it is to have onboarding and passive feedback mechanisms to protect the commons of “free” public speech. Blog comments on by default with no other efforts made to craft a healthy communication space are a bad idea — I agree with that.

What’s your favourite digital equivalent of a chatty sidewalk cafe? Do you have one?

I’m publishing this post on the WordCamp Canada site and the Edmonton WordPress Meetup site (WPYEG.org) via WordLand (wordland.social). WPYEG.org is federated with ActivityPub, so people following it on platforms like Mastodon will see this post too. (For example, edmontonian.social, mstdn.ca, ottawa.place, and wptoots.social.)

WordLand is the work of Dave Winer. Dave is our first announced WCEH speaker, the inventor of RSS, and a visionary for the web we hoped we’d get — and still believe we can create. 

Dave has blogged a lot about WordLand for several years — well before it had a name, as I recall. I remember him indirectly revealing the motivation behind WordLand (and also ActivityPub) last year in a post titled Why we’re lucky WordPress is here and other topics:

WordPress is, among other things, a perfect time capsule of open technologies from the early days of innovation on the web, and widely deployed and able to deliver all their benefits, if we widen our view of social media to be a social web, and simply create places where posts with and without titles are equally supported. It’s that simple. Without WordPress we would have to build all that, and wait for it to deploy in numbers, to matter in the market. All we have to do now is make the connections. #

That stuck with me. 

We do need to make the connections, now more than ever. 

Here’s Dave’s “big vision” for WordLand, a more technical “how-to” dive into it, and his thoughts about why it makes sense to bring this to WordCamp Canada.

What do you think?

*Canadians may recognize my title riffs on John Ralston Saul‘s brilliant 2017 essay “The Bridges Canada Must Build, Right Here at Home.” I used to have my students read and respond to it at MacEwan University. It’s relevant, on other levels, to the kind of web we want and our conference themes. You should read it if you haven’t. Thanks to the Wayback Machine you can.

Update: Dave recorded his thoughts and published a small account of the history of WordLand’s (and his own) relationship with WordPress.