 I'm attempting to articulate the difference between chat, chat-in-a-group and posting-plus-responses for others to overhear as we do on social networks. (IMHO the clear boundaries between those can only be historically explained because certain products did certain things and that sort of defined the categories.) I'm playing with "1-on-1 communication", "group communication", and "social communication" as terms. Are there better ones? 9 comments
@librenews I'm trying to not use the established product categories because they are just labels that we got used to, but instead to describe the characteristics of the communications structure. One reason: if we think of the fediverse as social media, we automatically fall into the bucket defined by Twitter and the like and it's hard to think outside of the category. If we think what kinds of communications there are, it's easier to say "why is x and y not in the same product", for example.  @J12t An important distinction arises out of the immediacy of the posts and responses. We expect posts in Chat apps to be seen very soon after they are created. And, we expect Chat responses to be published almost immediately. On the other hand, when publishing in something like an NNTP newsgroup, one expects that some will see posts soon after they are created, but many will not. Responses to newsgroup content are often still useful even when published many years after the initial post. @bobwyman Interesting, yes, you are right. There is also a stochastic effect to this: in a chat, I expect to see all messages. On social, I don't (although I hate that, but ...) @J12t I dislike the term "social" because it is so vague and potentialle all-encompassing. A more important difference as I see it is between having a specific intended audience (1-on-1 as well as group communication) versus having a less specific audience or at least not more specific than "those kind of folks" as you do when using a hashtag here on Mastodon. A better word might be "Publication" or "Posting". @malte Right. "Social" is a bit like speaking loudly in a pub to your friends, but everybody can hear you and chime in. While group communications is in a reserved room with a door.  there's "Chatting", and "Posting", seems.. Chatting is generally synchronous, text, voip, audio.. one on one, or in groups Posting is more asychronous.. reddit, masto, bulletin board systems.. Seems you're simply either chatting or posting. a recent addtiion is the return of the Multi User Dungeons.. think googledocs, miro boards, or collabora office.. Beyond MUDs, there's LAN games, and MMOs. Oh, and a whole genre of anime about interactions in virtual worlds.. US$0.02++ @mousey I agree these are the current categories. But if we started again from scratch, would we come up with the same ones again with hard boundaries between them? @J12t Being the only species which can transmit information across the globe to any number of other members of our species.. I'm happy we have as many modes as we do. "chatting" and "posting" is a good start.. Synchronous and Asynchronous communication seems to be the spectrum though, right? I mean, with the advent of language, we learned to transmit synchronously with the advent of written language, asynchronous comms was now possible, if you learned another layer of knowledge. |
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@J12t I consider the public/private 1 to 1 and group to be "messaging" and "group messaging" whereas the public stuff is "social" or "social media"
I recognize that might not help outsiders but it does seem to be how the software is categorized no?