Social Networking WG Meeting 2025-09-21

A meeting of the Social Networking working group.

Present: Sarah & Ben

• Set up regular meetings
• Further planning for a Merri-bek Tech digital town square
• Identify questions to shape trials

• Proposed meeting schedule: fortnightly to maintain momentum commencing either
  • Sunday 5 October 2pm
  • or Wednesday 8 October 7pm
• Technology options to explore
  • Mastodon
  • Bonfire
  • Lemmy
  • Matrix
  • Bulletin Board + links to outside world

• Project phases:
  • Create Platform vision guide
  • Select options
  • Compare options
  • Alpha test preferred option
    • How?

Summary here of the meeting discussion and key ideas that we can move forward with.

Principles are that the platform should be (amongst other things): open, porous, hyper-local, node-based, allow for interest-based connections.

Our working hypothesis is that a locally-controlled / decentralised digital town hall can enable community connections and resilience while resisting corporate domination and centralisation.

Identifying primary target users of the platform is important because it enables us to identify, select and prioritise the use cases and personas to guide platform selection. Later it will guide outreach, creation of supporting resources and capabilities, and development of onboarding plans. We identified several community groups as examples of the types of organisations we might target; involving groups like these will provide an active base for wider take-up:

• Brunswick Tool Library
• Good Karma Network
• Muslim Women's Council of Victoria
• Guerilla Gardening Naarm / Radicle Roots
• Balam Balam
• Library Services

Some activist groups (e.g. those that coordinate for protest) may have higher security needs which might not be our first priority (in balancing usability with security).

Essentials for successful launch and uptake include:

• onboarding plans, including advertising and outreach
• ability to sign-up using conventional email / mobile AND sign-up in a blackout
• pathways to find things: connect with familiar groups and interests, discovery
• first-time user experience and appearance high quality; entering a space that already has content, other users and familiar groups have a presence.
• account management capabilities for individuals and admin (password change and reset is possible; security is not overwhelming or obstacles)
• stewardship, including active content creation, structuring (e.g. taxonomies or tagging), moderation and culture setting

Other challenges to consider:

• visibility of critical announcements
• identifying and managing accounts to disseminate official announcements
• legalities such as age restrictions
• user privacy, management of user data per Australian Privacy Principles
• tendency towards lurking rather than active content creation
• what else?

Tools and technologies should be considered widely; social media is not necessarily the answer. Technologies people are familiar with, and which could have a role to play include:

• Email (but now highly dependent on centralised services from e.g. Gmail, Microsoft)
• Messaging (Signal, telegram, etc.) - addresses many of the use cases posed so far
• Bulletin boards (but appearance tends to be old fashioned - offputting? - and not natively federated
• Decentralised social media

Needs to be FOSS, standards-based, interoperable, robust.