The rediscovery of slowness

I have downsized my exposure to real time information feeds a lot lately.
This includes email, chat, web browsing and social media. I have cought myself with a behaviour pattern, that I have been describing as refresh addiction. Always checking if there is something new, always watching for news.
After some observation I have identified the interfaces as one of the reasons why this is addictive like a slot machine: Once the application is open it is always online, waiting for something to happen and so do you in front of the screen. It is a bit like building up a suspense in a story, just a little longer, then it will happen!

So I took some steps back. For most of the tasks I use the internet nowadays I do not need this instantanous response. I have found that it is easier to do tasks in badges. So I have switched to tools that encourage this with the benefit that offline use is usually the norm. Mails usually aren't urgent so you can reply to them after you think it over and have the energy to do them. Social media does usually work well with a couple of hours delay. I have been using #gopher for a lot of writing since the community there prefers well written responses over tongue in cheek comments.

#ssb does fit all this very nicely, especially the storage of content I create for distribution at a later opportunistic point.

As for my well being I have found that I can concentrate better, have more energy for the tasks at hand and fell more like being a master over time and place again.

You probably all know this already don't you?

@C-Keen

#ssb has some serious #filter problems that hamper slowness, but once we figure them out I think this network could be pretty uh... keen.

what we need to figure out is how to:

• filter out conversation threads instead of individual posts
• filter by boolean expressions of topic keywords
• private discussions among multiple people, that aren't replicated by default.
• more degrees of "interest," instead of just "follow someone and download everything from them since the dawn of time," "ban someone never talk to them and delete all their posts," and "huh? who's that?"
• filter who we send our messages and data to so that we could have stuff that goes to trusted friends, stuff that goes to family, or stuff shown to the general public, that sort of thing
• better support for saving drafts of unposted messages, and working on them slowly, instead of just typing the first thing that pops in your head, then praying your computer won't die before you hit the send button.
• calculate statistics on keywords and posters, showing how often someone's responded to us, if a keyword has more than 1 post tagged with it, who blocked our friends, etc.

@C-Keen there was a book, Soul of a New Machine, 1981, which described the race to get a new Data General mini system prototyped and onto the market. This was heady stuff in it's day: Data General was a staff breakaway from DEC, and DEC (like IBM) was more like a religion than an employer, so these guys were going for broke.

They are working crazy hours, pouring themselves into designing and prototyping cutting edge hardware, and one of them cracks: his workplace is found empty, but he has left a message on his screen. It reads "Gone to Virginia to join a commune, where the smallest unit of measured time is a season".

It's a thought that has stuck with me ever since.

(And yes, I recounted this once before here. But at my age you get to do that.........)

filter who we send our messages and data to so that we could have stuff that goes to trusted friends, stuff that goes to family, or stuff shown to the general public, that sort of thing

This is the most interesting one to me at the moment. It would be nice to group contacts into circles and be able to share content with those circles only.

The current way to have multiple accounts does work but is cumbersome, especially when the circles you want to share a certain post with change. I think they could change based on topic even.

@C-Keen I love this and have found a similar experience with #low-bandwidth and #offline experiences over the last 7 months.

The below was said recently which really resonated with me.

@noffle "Nice! Reflecting on how, in 2024, and probably for a very long distance into the future, I will always have an offline copy of my view of the scuttleverse that I can look over. On the internet this is a super power! "

When I was in fiji i said the following

I can feel my synaptic pathways changing as I spend more time #offline and in #low-bandwidth zones.

In particular I am referencing internet usage. At first I was psychologically stressed about this situation (given I am working on a number of distributed open-source projects) but have started to view this as an opportunity to master my useage, rather than going with the flow, as a feature rather than a bug.

I've actually noticed that I am starting to relate to connection as a scarce resource as result of which is that I am starting to mimic some of the patterns and approaches that the older geeks around me use. They arrived at networks and the internet when there was little expectation of constant connection. I came up in a space where there was constant connection available.

So a few of the super powers which ssb links in with:

• cypherspace (each person has a truename, private key)
• log (each person has an offline store of their perspective into the 'verse - once the preserve of sysadmin technically proficient geeks)
• the potential for a slower connection and offline first with less "always on" practices

@alanz "the ssb super power I like the most is the way it enables a kind of digital archeology.

There will be discussions, and after a while summaries, with back-links, and you end up with this complete record of how things evolved over time.

And this enables a kind of wikipedia serendipity experience, where someone pops up on your feed that you have not seen before, and you see they were active 2 years ago, and follow the posts, and find some really interesting stuff."

This all really resonates with me too! I LOVE searching by a phrase I am looking for and then stumbling across something related from years ago.

This all really resonates with me too! I LOVE searching by a phrase I am looking for and then stumbling across something related from years ago.

That was my only addition, missed some blockquotes there

• cypherspace as a space of democratising the super powers available from web 2.0

@ntoll has been working on a "...goofy #python editor for beginner programmers" called Mu and has gotten another beta out the door with an installer for Windows and macOS.

@dan hassan is "Seeking stories, fairy tales and parables with the "True Name" Pattern in them."

@noffle shared a "Plant Photobomb" including this and many other lovely shots

@curious-ideation has become a homeowner and shared some dogs on a deck.

Humanity

@dinosaur shared the idea that many of us may actually be "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"

@Tim Schumacher found a grant which may be useful to geeks in Germany, and that led to a discussion about

the tale:net project, which uses ssb to create the skilliverse, where users can create skills and ideas, assign skills to themselves and explore existing idea that match their skillset

@Sam Gwilym is sharing thoughts from their experiment in blocking themselves from certain websites in an attempt to reclaim some brain cycles.

Meanwhile C-Keen is exploring similar ideas:

I have downsized my exposure to real time information feeds a lot lately.
This includes email, chat, web browsing and social media. I have cought myself with a behaviour pattern, that I have been describing as refresh addiction. Always checking if there is something new, always watching for news.

@gmarcos87 shared a video about Chamas / Saving Circles and a note about Champesa (an app trying to bring useful technology to them).

@kropot is falling in love with the internet again thanks to decentralized systems and what they're bringing to the table. They share their thoughts on the topic here.

@Angelica made a dat-zine " that guides you through a five-minute computer break"

Solarpunk

@ladislas shared the progress on building their geodesic dome in France.

post 2 of 3

I can't get this attribute of slowness out of my mind.

One feature set which I miss from being in Fiji is that there were external forces which limited and throttled my internet connection. This was quite a similar scenario to dominic living on a boat or other #offline scenarios.

Now that I am back in Melbourne and have been at home a lot solo-parenting little I have found myself glued to the computer with it's constant internet connection.

I want to look into building this into my daily computer practice. Turn my wifi car off on my computer and just connect for a few hours per day...

It made me think we have an opportunity to highlight the benefits of this style of human-computer-network connection with ssb and it might make an interesting feature set.

I remember @Richard D. Bartlett offhandendly passing a comment some 5 months ago that has also never left me.

I have found myself wanting a big "disconnect from wifi" switch on top of the Patchwork UI. I am loving my little tastes of only-sometimes-online digital life.

Now that I am in constant connection land again, I feel like such a simple feature would actually be quite a profound one and one which really amplifies the spirit of how ssb is DIFFERENT to facebook infinite scroll....

Another example recently from #networkconvergence by @arj. People know and intuite that our connection-practices don't leave them feeling good. When shown slowness people are like - YES.

Yeah thats me doing an analog version of scuttlebutt. We might do a installation party to get people onboarded here (wifi permitting).

One of the comments was that people really like to slow aspect of this. The idea that, because messages have to scuttle around for a bit, people tend to put more thought into your posts, simply because posting in now or in 5 minutes won't really make much of a difference.

@dan hassan it reminds me of videoconferencing software where you are muted by default, and there's a 'push to talk' button. Like, Patchwork is offline by default, but you can check for updates when you're ready for more juice.

For a long time I've thought it would be cool to setup a "Startup Decelerator". Put people somewhere nice, get them to relax, get them connected to purpose, then maybe they will build startups that solve meaningful problems and not treat entrepreneurs like they're disposable.

@Richard D. Bartlett "Like, Patchwork is offline by default, but you can check for updates when you're ready for more juice."

Yeah - I have been thinking it might be nice to have a scheduler, with some sane defaults such as pull every 8 hours or something and then inbetween it is disconnected. It could be turned on to always-on, but that wouldn't be how it ships