I've really only actively been on Micro.blog for about a year. Micro Camp 2024 this past Friday was my first camp, and it was apparently a relatively stunted event compared to previous years. The first hour or so of the event was dedicated to a conversation with Christina Warren about blogging, her history of blogging, some "being online in general" discussion, and how fragmented the web feels in the aftermath of Twitter's implosion.

I too had been pretty active on Twitter for many years. I've only recently found community again with a group of likewise chronically ill and disabled folks with ME/CFS and related illnesses who are all trying to keep each other informed as we recognize what Covid and Long Covid are and what it means for our illnesses.

This type of community is found all over social media. Name an activity or a related set of circumstances and people have found each other and found "community" in that place. What that community means to each person is probably very different than what it means to another person. And by extension, the type of "thing" that brought that community together dictates the meaningfulness and bonds created.

Listening to Christina, Jean, and Manton, discuss the fracturing of these communities on Twitter, the scramble to find alternate platforms to coalesce, and how many people now find themselves spread across so many, made me think of my own communities on Mastodon.

I don't remember now what the "event" was, but it was the first time an event happened and we simultaneously heard and talked about it in-real-time on Mastodon. I recalled in the camp chat that the inclement weather event in Houston this week was also in-real-time in one or more of my timelines.

Speaking of timelines, that is one of the "tricks" I have found on Mastodon. One of the problems of Late Stage Twitter is that it was one giant behemoth beholden to an algorithm. Many little people drowned out by many large people. Maybe that was just fine for you but I tired easily of the large accounts. I tire of them on Mastodon too. What I have found worked for me on Mastodon was to find the Local timelines that I liked best, usually on smaller/niche instances, and then I joined them.

My first account was and still is on a large instance, mstdn.social, where I floundered a bit in the fall and winter of 2022. I was still looking for my people as many other people were. Over time I've found a great group of people, but it wasn't easy. This account eventually became a catch-all, but mostly I post and boost about gardening and birds.

I first tried to make it a giant replacement account for Twitter, but then I also remembered how hard it was to please everyone with all the parts of me. Some people might call this compartmentalization, and that might be fair. But not everyone who follows me for conversations about CSS and front-end development also wants to see my many boosts of bird pictures or listen to me whine about masking in public spaces. On Twitter, I found that it was too easy to alienate someone inadvertently.

Eventually I came across a post by someone announcing a new instance, disabled.social, run by and for disabled and chronically ill people. Right away I saw several familiar faces and names from the Twitter-sphere I had come from. It was an application instance, where you had to fill out information about yourself before being accepted. It is still run by the same two owners, though the admin and moderation team has rotated out a bit. The instance is fairly locked down, both taking a proactive stance on blocking and limiting other problem instances, but also locking down all access to only authenticated users. This greatly cuts down on harassment and abuse, which is very important for a community of vulnerable individuals.

The next instance I wanted to be a part of was specific to Portland and similarly required either filling out a form about yourself or acquiring an invite. I managed to get an invite from a friend from Twitter also on the instance, pdx.social. This instance is pretty small. I'm fairly sure this one was started for some Panic folks back when Mastodon had less demand, as there are more than a handful of Panic employees on there, and the owner/admin is one of them. There is some current reshuffling happening in regard to administration and moderation, as some people step back and others forward. I don't expect the community to change much as the people were already on the instance.

I found I still needed a technical and web related instance, perhaps artsy with some design mixed in. I'd come across front-end.social but at the time I still wasn't convinced I was interested in something so industry-adjacent. Around the same time two accounts I followed on pdx.social were posting from social.lol and I began snooping the Local timeline. I couldn't get enough of it and wanted to join. Of course, this led me to omg.lol and everything on this weblog and my current web life is what followed.

Micro.blog's community approach is still a struggle for me. As I built my little communities across Mastodon instances I relied on the Local timelines of many instances to get a feel for their users and core conversations. I also relied heavily on perusing follower lists of people I found interesting in order to find other interesting accounts to follow. Neither of those things are easy to accomplish on Micro.blog. There is no Local timeline, there is a hand-curated Discover timeline at the whims of one or more people's preferences, inherent biases (whether conscious or not), and the rules set out by Micro.blog. There also tends to be a content skew to what is fun, flashy, or new. This tends to obscure real conversation and the day-to-day mundanity of life.

I'm also unable to curate niche follower groups as I am on Mastodon with how I've compartmentalized my accounts across instances. So I find some days I'm just not in the mood to read anything and everything and avoid the timeline altogether. We can search using the Discover timeline and search by emoji (the equivalent of hashtags) but even I find myself not using these emoji with my own content so I'm not sure others are using it with theirs. Finding my community on Micro.blog has been tedious! I sometimes feel I only go there to talk to myself by way of posting to my blog.

Interactions just feel different there, not bad but not enthusiastic as I feel I get elsewhere on my different Mastodon accounts. Part of this may very well be the more "open" nature of posting on Micro.blog. There are not publishing levels, such as Listed, Unlisted, Only Followers, Only Mentions, like on Mastodon. I know many people I interact with on disabled.social will often take a conversation to Followers Only partway through because of the more relative safety of the discussion. So this leads me to think only real community can happen when everyone involved feels safe.

How have these platforms made their communities safe? Even on omg.lol there have been instances of questionable safety. Only recently I had to speak up about such an instance. It was uncomfortable and I'm still not sure where or how it has played out or if it is even done. Someone else may have felt safe, but I did not. What voices are protected while others get raised? Is the future of open communities realistic? Will we be further forced to find refuge in small intentional spaces?

The paradox of intolerance seems relevant more today than ever before. As we face increasing pressure to join forces by way of web standards, our intentional communities will become more open with other sources that are intolerant. In our current political climate, the idea of "tolerance" gets skewed, and the very people not tolerant of others turn the blame on those who wish to be tolerated by removing the intolerance. This is a mess, and I fear it may get messier as the spaces converge.

I think I'll wrap this up by laying out how I wish to form community myself:

1. A shared piece of oneself, something in common.
2. Willingness to listen before judging or offering advice or criticism.
3. Humbleness and concessions when proven wrong or hurtful.
4. Realism, positive or negative; both must be allowed.
5. Acceptance of boundaries; infractions must require steps to resolve.
6. Belief in each other's self, as identified.

I don't know if this post turned out how I expected but I feel a little bit of relief getting it out of my head. Actually documenting some of the thoughts that have been in there and trying to mark what I find important in community, where and how I've found it, and perhaps now I need to think about how I want to keep it. Thanks for following along if you've read this far! I'm curious how you find community in your life?

30.1min

41.8m climbed

152.7avg bpm

 

May 18, 2024

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Solarpunk 🌅

I propose that everything that occurs between the decision to plant a tree and the full expression of its canopy is short-term thinking.

Full Show Notes: https://www.thejaymo.net/2024/05/18/2409-short-term-thinking/

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Short Term Thinking

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before.

An old building, hundreds of years old, needs its roof beams replaced. The building’s custodians panic, unsure of where trees of sufficient size and quality might be found. Only to uncover some hitherto forgotten tale of foresight and planning.

Stewart Brand – known for the Whole Earth Catalog and Long Now Foundation – recounts a version of this story.

Something like this: Oxford University in the 1800s discovered that its ancient dining hall needed new oak beams. And a Junior Fellow suggested they check the college’s lands scattered across the country for some worthy oaks. The College Forester was then asked if there might be any suitable oaks. And he replies, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

As it turns out, when the dining hall was built, they planted a grove of oaks specifically to replace the dining hall beams. The plan passed down through generations of Foresters for over five hundred years with the instruction: “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

Or remember the viral clout posts that appeared online after the Notre-Dame fire. About how the French supposedly planted a row of oaks at Versaille, should the cathedral roof ever need repairing. 

Problem is … neither are true.

The curious thing I think, is that we want them to be true. We want to believe that those with power, both then and now, are capable of such acts of deep foresight. We latch on to them because it’s a farsighted vision that feels rare in today’s world. Which is exactly why Brand tells the story.

However, in contrast to fake stories about oak beams and church fires, planning and planting trees for shipbuilding is actually real. Not as an act of long-term foresight but instead, as pragmatic, short-term decisions taken to ensure future resources. If you want to build a ship from scratch, first you need to plant a tree.

Oaks planted during the reign of the Stuarts built the ships that fought the battle of Trafalgar 200 years later. Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood – Nelons friend (and man with a great name) – knowing this, encouraged the landed gentry to plant oaks to secure the future of the Navy. In Denmark, following the Battle of Copenhagen in 1807 the king ordered oak forests be planted to replace the lost ships. Of course things changed, but the trees matured nevertheless. At the turn of the millennium, 90,000 oaks were ready for use. 

“Long-term thinking” or rather, the concept of  “Longtermism” has recently come under suspicion. Effective Altruism has been put under the spotlight after the trial of Sam Bankman-Freed. In fact, Alice Crary, writing in Radical Philosophy Journal, recently called EA’s Longtermism a ‘toxic ideology’. Concerned with safeguarding humanity’s future in a manner that leaves current harmful socioeconomic structures unexamined. Which is fair enough. Yet culture still faces a critical problem: the seeming complete lack of ability to effectively plan and execute on, well, anything. 

Instead of focusing on “long-term thinking,” I propose we reframe what the “short-term” is.

What do we need to do today, to lay down frameworks for the people of the future? What will be useful?

I would like to propose that everything that occurs between the decision to plant a tree and the full expression of its canopy is short-term thinking.

In regenerative agriculture, when farmers convert fields over to mixed use agroforestry, they design for the full canopy height first. Other species will then get interplanted between the trees of the final overstory. Which, let’s assume, is oak, which is slow growing. So in between the oaks you plant a shorter lifespan species like a nut tree. And between them, faster 30-year fruit trees, and below them all fruit bushes. Life cycles within life cycles. Everything between you and the oaks is ‘short-term’. Which is a nuanced relationship to time that far outstrips our current culture of quarterly reports and yearly planning by a long long way.

Landscape restoration also deals in systems that unfold over centuries. Experts warn us of the “thousand-year mistake”. Archaeology can still identify 1000-year-old ditches in subsoil for example. The digging swales or the building of ponds, permanently impacts a landscape’s hydrology. So it matters where you put them. 

Other mistakes also occur across shorter timescales: Consider the needs of a natural windbreak. To be most effective they need a 45° angle ramp on the windward side. So you plant bushes, then small trees, then larger trees, to get the right angle right.

Now imagine it’s planting day. There’s a pile of unlabelled whips of the largest tree on the ground. Then someone carrying another bundle of sticks of the shorter variety drops them on top of the existing pile. Mixing and confusing them – but the planting must happen. The consequences of that split second of inattention may echo in the landscape for a century.

We have no idea what 2124 is going to be like. We also know that we can’t fix everything today. But we do know when an oak planted today will reach its full height tomorrow. And that every action that we take today shapes the world of tomorrow.

Short-term pragmatic actions taken right now are gifts to the future. For people will never meet and never know. In this new short-term we must create frameworks for the future that others can build on. I call these gestures ‘keystones of continuity’.

Because you can’t move a tree once planted, only cut it down.

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